130. A Common Crypto Mistake That Cost Bergs a 20x (2000%) Gain.

Ben, I have to tell you, this hurt a lot.

Yeah, it's just about that mental preparation and usually you're not motivated to do that preparation until it's important or money goes up. The unfortunate lesson is just like shit happens fast in crypto and when it's.

Important and things are happening, it's too late. I'm now back to being a bag holder and oh my God, I just want to die.

Welcome back to another episode of the bennetbergs podcast. I'm Ben, your favorite high school dropout and founder of Collective Shift. Alongside me is Bergs, your favorite MBA and CEO of Collective Shift. Join us as we bring you world class crypto research and strategies to help you dominate this crypto bull market, as well as behind the scenes view of us scaling a fully remote subscription research business in Australia. And today we are talking about how Bergs, the guy that works full time in crypto, forgot how to sell his crypto and missed out mate on a 20 bagger. Oh, that's thousand into 20,000, mate. How did you go about fumbling the ball on this one?

Ben, I have to tell you, this hurt a lot. It hurt a lot. So I've gone through, I've written out my plan for all of my crypto and somehow I missed, missed this little nugget, Ben, I missed was in one of my watch lists though, so I saw it go up. So back in 2017, I participated in the Power Ledger ICO. I'm sure a lot of us did. You know, it was one of a promising token. It went up quite a lot. Of course I didn't sell back then. I just held it and it's been around like, you know, 10 cents, 20 cents. Ever since the ICO was like 6 cents, it's been eating away at me. So anyway, crypto starts pumping, man. You know, bitcoin's going up, arbitrum's going up, Magic's going up. A few things like that I'm holding and all of a sudden, power Ledger goes on a run and I'm like, oh, this looks a bit tasty. Goes to like 30 cents, 50 cents, 80 cents a dollar, all the way up to a dollar 20 USD. Now, Ben, I look at this and I go, a significant amount of money. I might sell this. All right, let's get rid of it. Finally get it off, you know, get it out. Got my CGT discount ready. Everything's ready to go. So first of all, I go, shit, where is it? I've got the address, but I don't know where it is. I'm like, okay, it's on one of my hardware wallets. I'm like, okay. So I'm looking through the address and I've got different tokens, I've got everything there. And I'm like, oh, there's no ETH in that address. I'm like, well, how am I going to pay my gas fees and where am I going to send it to? So I look at the exchanges I'm on. I'm on three different exchanges. None of them have power ledger listed as a token. Because my plan was send it to an exchange, transfer it, fiat out, pay my tax, go and do something funny with the money, go on a holiday. Can't do that. I'm like, okay, so I don't have it on exchange. All right, no problems. Well, we'll go to a dex, we'll do this. So first of all, I have to transfer some ETH over. So I gotta find that hardware wallet, find the hardware wallet, do a couple of updates, crack it open. This is one I haven't cracked open probably since 2017. That's where I send all my stuff. Crack open, great. Gotta send some money across. Network fees. Insane. It's like a hundred something bucks for gas. And I'm like, oh, Jesus. I'm like, fine, whatever, I'll do that. But what else do I have to do? I have to use Uniswap. Haven't used Uniswap in a while. It's gone up a version since I used it. And I've been hearing about sandwich attacks and slippage and everything else. And I'm like, oh, crap. So I start reading about it. I'm like, what buttons do I have to tick in the ui? What do I have to do? And then I'm like, well, hang on a minute. What's going to happen is I'm going to have a gas fee to move my ETH over. Then I'm going to have a gas fee to interact with that contract on Uniswap. Then I'm going to get something like usdt. Then I'm going to have a gas fee to send it to the exchange. And then it all just became too hard, Ben. And I'm like, look, this is way too much. This is too hard. I cannot be bothered. I'm probably going to stuff it up. This is ridiculous. And at that point in time, it was like late at night, I'm probably going to get fished. And I'm like, I just cannot be bothered. This is all too hard. I wake up in the morning, I'll do it. Then wake up in the morning, bang, power ledge is back down at 30 cents.

And then. Do you know what hurt the most in this was. What hurt the most is that with all the ICOs I've been in, if I just held F, it would have outperformed it.

Yeah, everything.

If it just held. Held ether. This one actually outperformed just holding ether. So it would have been amazing. And I didn't sell it. I'm now back to being a bag holder. And I'm like, oh, my God, I just want to die. And I had to share this with people.

This thing dumped from a $20 down to. Oh, back down at 30 cents.

Yeah. And what's wild is people were actually buying power ledger at like, 80 cents, 90 cents a dollar when it was just pumping. And then it just dumped back down immediately. And they're like, oh, you guys are crooks. You're this, you're that. And it just reminded me of, like, 2017. We used to have that. See the chart? How wild is, like, what the hell happened? Exactly. I. I genuinely do not know what happened. I tried to look for 15 minutes, couldn't find a reason to. I don't really care. And it's just something that I was holding from 2017, and I don't know what happened. Whether, like, you know, one of the people was buying or buying significant amounts. Someone was accumulating.

I know, right?

This thing has literally gone from 30 cents to a dollar 20 in, like.

Three days, and just. And then just come flying back down to 44 cents.

Exactly. This is crypto, mate. Like, this. This is the taste of the bull market. These are the things you're gonna have to prepare for.

So is this on Uniswap? Is that where you are?

Yeah, it's on there, yeah. Yeah. So. And again, like, the liquidity was quite poor on Uniswap, and, you know, there's slippage and on and on it goes, and it was just all too much. So I've worked out a plan, Ben. I've got a plan, and I've actually implemented my plan. I'm very proud. This is the reason I'm doing the episode, because I think there are a lot of people that have random tokens that they've forgotten about that may be in a similar situation to me. So I followed your advice, mate. I've gone and started a Coin Spot account. And this is the complication as well, because you've got private accounts, you've got trust accounts, you got this you got that in different names started. Coin Spot account, highly recommend it. It was like four seconds to set up. It was brilliant. It was really, really easy. I've now transferred my power ledger over there and I've set an order. So that is just going to trigger at the number that I want and I've layered that out as well and it is just sitting there and I'm comfortable doing that because it's not a huge amount of money, it's not my whole stack, but it's something that I want to offload and I want to offload at a certain price. So next time this huge pump happens, no one's going to see it coming. No one knows why someone's buying somewhere. I'll be able to sell that off at that market price and the money will just be sitting in that account. I can move it out and I can go on my holiday.

Yeah, nice man.

Yeah.

It's just about that mental preparation. Right. Like, and usually you're not motivated to do that preparation until it's important to money goes up. But like you just, you know, like, you know, the unfortunate lesson is just like shit happens fast in crypto and.

When it's important that things are happening, it's too late. Like if things are happening, think about what's going on in the background. People are buying, there's a hive of activity. Gas fees are high, you're going to have to wait for transfers. Exchanges can be slow. You won't be able to do your KYC quickly. You, it's, there's too much going on. You need to be prepared. And this was one little thing that was sitting in my portfolio that I'd pretty much written off. That has now shown me potential I've missed out on. And now I can go back and actually put it on an exchange and sell it.

I still fundamentally don't know why this is like pumped so much. Like I wonder if they had a big.

Like, like usually you see like if it was someone that like, like fat thumbed an order, like maybe a, like a, like a one candle spike. But this was like a, it was.

Accumulating over a few days. Like someone was actually buying at market rate and acquiring.

But I don't know why they bought at A$20 and then it just shot all the way down.

I think, honestly I think liquidity was that low. Yeah, it's been sitting at 30 cents for like years.

Yeah.

Because what's the market cap on it? Yeah. 135 mil.

Yeah. So market cap was big, but what's the 24 hour volume? It might be higher now, but back then it would have been relatively low. So it wouldn't take much to move the market.

The volume went to.

Yeah, I mean the 24 hour volume right now, 9 million and it got to.

Got to a billion.

There you go. Exactly. So if you, if, if you're buying a billion, you're punching through that 9 million people are going to sell at a higher and higher and higher rate. And if you want to accumulate, you have to pay that market rate. So it just pumps because the liquidity is so thin.

That's why I wonder if they had like a big, a big contract or someone that bought a bunch of tokens maybe had like. Mind you, I don't know why they do a billion dollar order on spot.

It is so wild. Like maybe, yeah, exactly. Like maybe some rich guy got into it. Maybe it was a contractual thing. Maybe, maybe, maybe it doesn't matter. Like we're not privy to this information because we're not in the company. But it shows you the potential of something and how to set it up to take advantage of it. And that is something that I want to drive home to people. If you're holding smaller cap tokens, get on any way you can. If you're, if you're comfortable to just monitor it and then use uniswap, do that, set your targets. Or if you're not comfortable and you want to automate it, take that exchange risk, put it on an exchange and have your orders to lay it out. So you can just go to sleep at night one day that will trigger and you'll be a happy person.

Yeah. You had that plan in place a hundred percent, man.

Absolutely. So I've got my big plan which is like 95% of my tokens. This was in the 5% that I didn't account for. It is now accounted for. And even though I had that event, I wasn't able to cash out. I'm still happy because I've learned, I've grown, I'll be able to take advantage of it next time.

And nice work on even having that like in your watch list because I mean some people might not even. And this is the problem with having too many tokens, right? You don't even know what's doing what. So having those alerts or the watch list set up so you and monitor what prices are doing for your tokens is, that's half the problem. You don't even know what the tokens doing. You would have missed that four or five days, look back and go, fuck.

What happened to power? And the reason I did it was because I did that strategy on Collective Shift. Then I put my tokens on the Collective Shift platform and that is the only way I actually recognized it. And when things are pumping, I'm waking up in the morning, I'm looking at the collection Shift platform, I'm seeing how much my money has gone up, right? And then all of a sudden this one's going up more and more and more and I'm like, whoa. And I would not have had visibility of that if I didn't do that strategy. Realize the tokens I was actually still holding, and then put them in that watch list.

Great work. For those people that are listening that haven't done your Strategy, head to CollectiveShift IE and head to the Research tab. And at the bottom you've got a link to our template to help you with your own strategy. It's going to help you immensely in full market.

Absolutely, mate. So there you have it. I missed out on a 20 bagger. It still stings, but at least I've done something and I've got a process in place now, so it won't happen again.

Yeah, nice work, mate. Thank you everyone for listening. If this helped you at all, we'd love for you to please follow the podcast on Spotify, Android or Apple Podcasts. Wherever you listen to the podcast, give us a follow helps us grow the podcast. And if you're on YouTube, hit the subscribe button. We come to you each and every week, twice a week, with crypto, personal growth and business insights. Thank you so much for listening, everyone. We'll see you on the next episode.

Thanks, champions.