And that was when I felt like, okay, trying to win a speculative game against just ruthless sharks who will do whatever it takes to make a quick buck, even if it means cannibalizing something they've invested in, you maybe don't want to get too caught up in the belief that you can actually win that game.

I'm Ricky Mulvey and that's Nathaniel Eliasin, the author of crypto confidential, winning and losing millions in the new frontier of finance.

Motley Fool's Scott Cassing caught up with Eliasison for a conversation about how crypto became like an addictive video game for him.

The yield promises in this space like making 4% per day that were impossible to keep, and what investors looking at artificial intelligence

opportunities can learn from past crypto-hype cycles.

Now, parts of today's show get to the complete opposite of foolish investing and I think you'll get something out of it.

Nat, the world of cryptocurrency tokens is unchartered territory for many of our listeners,

but we love speaking with those with unique life experiences and you certainly qualify and I'm always fascinated with those who have

tried ways to reduce the time required to retire. So with that, what did your early attempts to make

money in cryptocurrency look like? Well, you know, I got excited about it a couple of times in the past. The first time I tried to make some

money quickly in crypto was in 2017-2018.

If anybody remembers that first mania back then

with the ICOs, the initial coin offerings

when people were launching whatever new token they could in that era trying to follow on Bitcoin and

Ethereum's price run up and then the market crashed then I forgot about it for a

little while and then 2020 came around and suddenly we were back in another crazy

cryptomania and I had remembered some of the patterns from last time and I remembered

that I had some friends who had gotten pretty into it in the interim.

And I was in a situation. I had my first kid coming.

I didn't really know what my financial life was going to look like on the other side of that.

And I was trying to figure out what to do career wise and it became this perfect storm of seeing all of these people supposedly making tons of money speculating on Doge coin and whatever else me having a lot of free time and a little bit of a

gambling purse to start with and then kind of just getting it in my head that well if these

...