Obviously I haven't written about College Basketball in over a year. With Covid happening about a year ago I was personally devastated as many were, mainly regarding college basketball. I still look back at the potential 2020 bracket being the craziest and most entertaining tournament from top to bottom that we would have ever seen. I legitimately believe that a team like Liberty or Harvard (if fully healthy) could have made the elite eight. I think Ohio State could have won it all. Dayton could have been the first 1 seed from the A10 since St. Joes back in the Jameer Nelson days. The cancellation broke me and took me to a dark place mentally. College hoops was what I lived for, last year was probably the height of my fandom and also the peak as I have not been able to fully get back into it this year. Maybe it's the fact that I still can't play basketball myself and it's killing me (gotta be able to play soon right?). Or it could be that a lot of those players from last year have moved on and those teams I fell in love with are no longer the same. But the main reason honestly is investing.
When everything happened last year and sports were cancelled I cancelled my cable and turned to YouTube. What I discovered was a wealth of information and I fell in love with the idea of cryptocurrencies and physical gold and silver, along with some stock investments. This proceeded to change my life in a hugely positive way. I started working Postmates food delivery as much as I could just to accumulate more Bitcoin and Ethereum (Bitcoin was at $8,000 and Ethereum was at $200). All the money I had been wasting in the past on sports gambling turned into crypto investment and physical silver and gold (started buying when silver crashed to $13 and gold was $1700). It was amazing, I had found a way to get the rush of gambling while also saving my money in investments that I believe will change the world. I found that my ability to withstand low amounts of money in my bank account (from gambling) was perfect for going all in on crypto and physical metal, where you have the ability to become your own bank. The volatility in crypto doesn't bother me because the volatility of betting a college basketball game was much harder to bear. The fact that I could store my money in these investments that are totally undervalued was really appealing to me.
I firmly believe that Bitcoin will change the world for the better. Bitcoin is a magnificent creation because it has no owner or CEO, it has no leader or president, it is determined by simple math and code that cannot be changed, and it is backed by millions of Bitcoin miners who secure the network. The math dictates that every four years the amount of bitcoin that can be mined per day is cut in half. This event is called the halving and it just happened in May of 2020. Consequently we usually see the price go higher the following year and here we are in 2021 and Bitcoin is $48,000. That's like going all in betting +500 on a team to win it all. But it's college basketball, it's random. This was guaranteed by math. Bitcoin I believe based on previous cycles will go to $300,000 this year. That was before we had Mass Mutual, Microstrategy, Tesla, Ivy League Endowments, and hundreds of other rich family office funds begin to accumulate Bitcoin for the long term. This is why I have dedicated all my time and effort into accumulating more of these cryptocurrencies, because I believe it can create life changing wealth and help normal people escape the system we are currently in.
Ethereum is a whole different animal and some Bitcoin followers still haven't given it full credit. Ethereum is basically a blockchain that allows other products, services, and applications to be built on top of it. This blockchain based building allows code to be written that can guarantee trust without a third party. This has spawned decentralized finance, where you are able to lend and borrow money with trustless peer to peer contracts regardless of your credit history. Sounds risky but it has to be backed by collateral. This is huge for the future of finance because with governments moving to digital currencies they will then have the ability to dictate what you can buy, your interest rate, your ability to get a loan based on their principles. Defi does not discriminate in any way. There is also a new craze of NFT (non fungible tokens) being created like NBA top shots. These are digital pieces of art, highlight reels, items within a video game, that cannot be recreated. They are verifiable and rare based on how many are made. People have begun to collect these items as we go further into a digital world, most of what's really happening in crypto is built on Ethereum.
Physical silver is something that I never understood until last year. I wanted a physical item that I could hold onto that I knew was valuable. Silver is used in technology like computers, televisions, cell phones. It's also used in electric vehicles, solar panels, green energy, and medical equipment. The amount of use for silver is only growing while the amount being produced is only going down. This creates a supply and demand issue that I believe is just beginning to play out with the Wall Street Bets #silversqueeze . I believe everyone should own some physical silver in their possession.
In conclusion, I am happy that covid cancelled march madness as depressing as it was in the moment. I learned so much and have financially reaped the benefits so far. I gamble less and put more into crypto and metal. It woke me up to the constant printing of money, why would I want to save my money in that? People making middle class salaries are never going to make it saving dollars. Saving in assets is the new way to go, that's why stock markets have been going up so much. No one wants their dollars.