This is it, I thought. I was peering at the cryptocurrency app on my phone, watching the value of my portfolio tick up in real time. In the past 24 hours it had grown by £120, and now I could watch as it updated, second by second: £1,125.43, it told me… £1,125.44… £1,125.48… £1,125.47… £1,125.60. At last, the fabled ‘Banana Zone’, which is what they call it in crypto circles when prices explode and hucksters like me make millions from bottlecaps.
I was going to be rich! Rich! ‘What are you doing on your phone, Dad?’ my 14-year-old asked me. ‘Um,’ I said, thinking of the Lamborghini I was going to wow him with when my chickens came home to roost. ‘Playing Marvel Snap.’ And off I disappeared to the toilet to continue my speculations undisturbed… where I watched the value of my portfolio collapse. Again.
Ah, salad days. Were there clues? This is a story of before – and after. Let’s keep it cheerful, for now, and begin with the before. Like, I suspect, very many of us, I had noted the way cryptocurrency had become a thing – and I had mostly ignored it. ‘Something something complicated maths, something something something free of the dead hand of government, something something decentralised ledger of transactions.’ I hadn’t been convinced. But like, I suspect, very many of us, I nevertheless couldn’t stop hearing the drip, drip stories of people who dropped a couple of grand on crypto and are now millionaires.
I felt a nagging twinge in the part of the brain marked FOMO – and wondered if it wasn’t too late to get in on the action, after all.
So, when I was challenged by YOU to spend a few months and £1,000 of the Mail On Sunday’s money in the hopes of becoming a crypto millionaire, it felt like the right time to put my scepticism to one side. After all, 2025 was being hyped as the big crypto year. We were living through the era of Trump – ‘the first crypto President’.
Bitcoin was developed in 2008, and quickly rose in value – today a Bitcoin is worth just over £66,000
Crypto, for those who need a refresher, all started with Bitcoin. In 2008, a clever fellow (or group of fellows) going by the name of Satoshi Nakamoto developed and made public a method for creating a digital currency that: 1) could be reliably exchanged anonymously; 2) had a limited supply, meaning that it couldn’t lose value in the way that normal currencies do when governments print money; and 3) couldn’t be interfered with by any government or bank (they can’t impound Bitcoin, or tax it, or devalue it).
At first, people thought that Bitcoin, and its many imitators, might become a new standard currency. But it didn’t quite work like that. People did trade it for real-world currency and, as more people climbed aboard, it rose stupendously in value. If you bought a Bitcoin in 2011, two years after its launch, it would have cost you a few quid.
A Bitcoin today is worth just over £66,000. Some people have become very rich indeed. Nakamoto is thought to own 1.1 million bitcoins, which probably makes him richer, in theory, than Elon Musk.
So here’s what happened when I invested £1,000 in crypto.
FEBRUARY
Value of my bag: £1,000
Needing a guru, I consulted my friend Tibor, a British novelist who has taken a strong interest in crypto. I suspect this has something to do with a rather depressing lunch we had in Brixton after the 2008 crash, where, solemnly removing his beanie, he opened the conversation by telling me, ‘That’s it, then. There’s no money any more for anyone, except Russian oligarchs and [dark look] footballers.’
I told Tibor I intended to sink £1,000 into crypto and see how I fared. First you need to sign up to an exchange – Coinbase is the most popular, apparently, but he recommended Kraken as having cheaper fees. Then deposit your cash, browse the vast menu of coins and you’re away. Tibor said some clever-sounding things about smart contracts and DeFi and four-year cycles – most of which entered my ears in the same way as the dog in The Far Side cartoon hears his owner (‘Blah blah, Ginger, blah blah’). Then he announced that wise heads speculated we might be about to enter the ‘Banana Zone’.
That sounded like something to aim for.
After a frustrating few days trying to establish a Kraken account (spam filter eating my verification codes: I hate you), I got on and piled in. My strategy, to start with, was to have about half my dough in the big (and therefore marginally more stable) ones: so I bought £200 of Bitcoin, £200 of Solana and £200 of Ethereum. Then I snapped up a bunch of other coins that caught my fancy. In honour of crypto’s most famous use-case, I spent £100 on Grass (no, not that: a coin called Grass), and the same amount on Mango because everyone likes mangoes, right, and there isn’t a Banana coin. Now, I thought, to do what smart investors do – like Erik Finman, who at the age of 12 borrowed $1,000 from his granny, piled it into Bitcoin and was a millionaire by 19 – and hold. Or, in internet speak, ‘hodl’ (hold on for dear life, despite swings in value).
MARCH
Value of my bag: down to £832.97
I had second thoughts about just hodling. It wouldn’t make a very interesting article. Plus, I’d prefer to be a crypto millionaire now rather than in 25 years’ time. So as to be an informed investor, rather than the sort of rube who buys Mango because he likes mangoes, I joined a few ‘crypto Discords’: secret back-of-internet message rooms (called things like Cryptohub and Elite Crypto Signals) to learn from the experts. The result of this was that I got the odd message from people asking solicitously about my trading success, or warning that I needed to click on some link to make sure I couldn’t be scammed, or direct messaging telling me not to trust anyone who DM’d me. But not much in the way of actual, useful advice. Over the next several weeks, rather than becoming rich and seeing a #lambo materialise on my driveway, I watched glumly as the snapshot of my portfolio was uniformly adorned with gloomy little red arrows heading down.
APRIL
Value of my bag: up to £834.97
In late spring, desperate for action, I scanned my crypto app’s ‘gainers’ – like 1970s Top Of The Pops, this will helpfully indicate this week’s big climbers – and discovered that something called Zerebro had surged by more than 170 per cent in a day. It was on fire! Was this the mythical Banana Zone? I bought 1,000 Zerebros. Twenty-four hours later it had surged in the opposite direction. Thank goodness I didn’t plop the whole stack on it, as I’d been tempted to.
‘It’s not the despair,’ as John Cleese says in Clockwise, ‘I can take the despair. It’s the hope I can’t stand.’ Take early April, for instance, when Trump announced ‘Liberation Day’ and tariffs galore and the world economy had a fit. Surely now, the much-touted ‘digital gold’ would do what analogue gold always does in times of turbulence, ie, shoot up in value. But no: it plummeted.
I can only assume the people touting crypto as an alternative refuge for capital lost their nerve and bought gold instead. I started to wish I had, too.
MAY
Value of my bag: up to £1,130.91
I heard from Tibor. ‘Greetings from a truly sunny Budapest,’ he said. He was cheerful. Not long previously he’d said he thought crypto could be in the doldrums for months. Now it was, he declared, ‘out from under the frog’s arse’ (a Hungarian expression: a bad situation is ‘under a frog’s arse down a coalmine’). My stake, I confirmed, was nearly back to what it had been when I initially bought crypto. I had learnt my lesson, I told him, from my ill-advised flirtation with obscure coins that I’d bought just because I liked the names.
He was understanding. ‘I bought Dogwifhat purely on the basis of the cute picture,’ he confessed. Dogwifhat? I looked it up. Tibor was right! It was a cute picture: a dog, wearing a hat.
I immediately bought a not-insignificant stake in $Dogwifhat. And, you know what? A few weeks later I noticed $Dogwifhat was roaring up in price, doubling in the first week in May. I piled in and bought more.
I emailed Tibor, jubilantly: ‘Dogwifhat is doing rather well.’ He replied, ‘No one can predict memecoins. True Russian roulette.’ Sure enough, the dog stopped wearing a hat and started wearing a frog’s arse 24 hours later and I sold at a loss. But my stake wasn’t big and by late May, without having done a damn thing that anyone could call clever, my portfolio was up 13 per cent on what it had been at the start.
JUNE
Value of my bag: down to £864.06
I started trading in earnest. Moonchain is a fast mover. I bought a bunch of that. Whoops! Ten per cent of my stack vanished in a 24-hour period. Then I found some old email saying that SPX6900 was the coin to buy this month. And that, roughly, is where we came in. It reached a six-month high, rising ten, 15 per cent a day. I wondered about dipping into my pension. And then… well, I did say there was an ‘after’.
I had bought about £500 worth, just in time to see it rocket up in price. Now I had swapped another £250 or so out of boring old Bitcoin to take advantage of SPX6900’s bull run.
On 12 June, SPX6900 was worth £1.19 a coin. Ten days later, it was worth 75p.
DECEMBER POSTSCRIPT:
Totally disillusioned, I decided to leave my cache alone in the hope it would rise by itself over the summer and through into the winter months. It didn’t.
At the time of writing, my £1,000 initial investment in crypto from February is worth £712.29. No! I tell a lie: £712.42… No! £712.32… £712.24… So, ‘hodl’, right? Well, maybe, but just two weeks ago a CNN report headlined ‘Why the crypto market is crashing’ pointed to a ‘$1 trillion wipeout over the past six weeks that has tested even crypto’s most diehard believers’. Hmm.
So what else can I do with it? Crypto does have some use-cases as a currency. You can pay ransomware attackers with it, buy (so I gather) drugs and guns on the dark web. For a while, you could lunch in a café in El Salvador. There is a ten-pin bowling alley in Wandsworth that accepts crypto. In the States, Wholefoods, Starbucks and Microsoft accept such payments. And, as of recently, you can use crypto to direct money to the US President. Most of these, I’d submit, are not the use-cases humdrum Brits like you and me will find handy. And, sure, I’m down £300. But, if you fancy your chances, see Tibor’s top tips. Good luck at the Banana Zone.
FINAL VALUE £712.42
How to invest in crypto
By Tibor Fischer
I’m no financial advisor, but I’ve tracked crypto for years as research for my novel, My Bags Are Big. Want to invest? Here are some thoughts.
★ Don’t rush. DYOR (do your own research) is the mantra of the crypto maestros.
★ Coin Bureau videos on YouTube offer ‘how to’ beginner guides. CoinGecko offers an up-to-the-minute crypto ‘league table’.
★ The bad news. You can lose your money. Like any investment, crypto can go wrong and no one is coming to save you.
★ On the other hand, Bitcoin has been one of the past decade’s best investments.
★ Note, ‘crypto’ is a loose term covering many things. Ethereum is a smart-contract blockchain now favoured by Wall Street for the future of financial activity; Fartcoin is a useless memecoin, inspired by an AI influencer.
★ How to start? All sorts of routes in. There’s the fogey, Victorian route of simply buying stocks in crypto concerns. Michael Saylor’s Microstrategy is pretty much now a Bitcoin bank. Coinbase is the biggest US crypto exchange.
★ Coinbase and Kraken (another big US exchange) are ‘approved’ for the UK.
★ Crypto purists say exchanges should be used like public toilets: go in, do your business, leave. However, many people are tempted to leave their crypto on exchanges – Coinbase and Kraken offer ‘staking’ on certain cryptos, a bit like interest on a bank account.
★ Patience, and choosing wisely, are important. Those who made money were the minority who opted for quality cryptos and held them for years, while the majority laughed at them.