Putting this on the blockchain for fun and posterity.
May 25th, 2016
### A new ICO for old code
Like many people in cryptoland I threw some money at Lisk to gamble on this rebranded Crypti actually going somewhere this time. I bought on the first day and expected the Initial Coin Offering (ICO) campaign to be successful but not ***15,000 bitcoins*** successful. I mean, it was basically a subset of Crypti guys taking the code that had only just recently been open-sourced and reselling it in a new way. But the theory goes investors were riding high on Ether profits and figured another ICO would be a great place to put some of it, and Lisk was there at the right time. At the end of the crowdsale, the price I paid for each LSK was about 0.00016 BTC.
### Playing the waiting game
The ICO was so successful I figured everyone who wanted to speculate on it had all the opportunity to buy before release, and post release there would be no buyers, leading to a lower market price than people paid for it and much butthurt. With yobit's LISK IOU tokens trading at very high levels since they began offering them it was exciting to think of the possibility that Lisk could trade at much higher prices than I anticipated.
I kept an eye on their newsletters and forum thread and was thankful they delayed the launch by a month, to May 24th, 2016, because getting it right usually takes way more time than people estimate. Near launch time I started looking into running a node, because their plan was to point *everyone* to their web login wallet. This seemed like a recipe for disaster, and turns out I was right.
Launch day. Lisk launches at 8:00PM UTC. I'm looking over the documentation on node installation, which it turns out was outdated by a few versions. I visit the Lisk chat site and see that just a few minutes ago, and about 3 and a half hours before launch, Poloniex announced they would be adding Lisk later in the day. Great news, they're a top notch alt exchange. I'm more excited. I keep looking into strategies for running a node and settle on running it using Docker on Docker Toolbox. As long as they put the docker image where they say it will be on launch, everything will work right?
### A botched launch
It's 8:00PM UTC! Launch time. Unfortunately, but as expected, Lisk web login is not functional. It initially gives a 502 error and after a reload or two it displayed a box saying "Blockchain is loading..." So I left that tab open and opened a new tab that I could reload and see if I got any progress that way.
The Lisk chat site is lagging out. People are posting images of Lamborghinis burning and GIFs of the Space Shuttle Challenger in their bitcointalk thread.
 
After a couple minutes I realized it was time for the backup plan, run the local node. `docker pull lisk/mainnet` as per updated instructions. It's not there. At this point I'm not in a particular hurry because I intended on selling the bulk of the Lisk I bought on Poloniex and based on their twitter message I figured they'd take an hour or two before opening the market. But Poloniex was on the ball and added the LSK market and wallet deposits a mere 8 minutes after the mainnet launched! Well shit. Try it again, and again. No docker image. Plan C, install binaries. Following the instructions on the online install docs I downloaded the installer bash script and ran it.
That doesn't look like anything got installed. Tried it another time, same result. Ok let's look at what this thing does. The binaries got put [here](https://downloads.lisk.io/lisk/main/0.3.0/) but the broken script isn't coded to properly find them. I downloaded/extracted the Linux binaries and using the bash script as a guide, I got the node running and syncing. At this point it's 30-40 minutes after launch time and I have a running node! On Poloniex, high value bids are piling up. I see there's some ridiculous 1000+ BTC/LSK value orders for dust that always seem to pop up when a new market is added but before any deposits confirm. Interestingly there are non-dust bids at over 0.01 BTC and an 80 BTC bid at 0.005 with a couple dozen BTC in between. Meanwhile the official web login is still hopelessly broken, going from 502 error to "Blockchain is loading" and back again. I know I have an advantage.
### Gotta move those tokens
I get a Poloniex deposit address, send the LSK from my two ICO accounts, and wait, hoping I'm not off on a fork or something. It takes longer than I expected but my deposits show on Poloniex's history page. They required 303 confirms, oh crap how long is that going to take? The faulty bash install script included a command to check the blockheight from the Lisk daemon. I clocked it at 6 blocks per minute, exactly the blocktime Lisk is intended to run.
That was a long hour. I kept refreshing the deposit history page a bit puzzled at why the reported confirms weren't going anywhere. I kept looking back to the market page to see if anyone had traded and see what the bids were. I think I only saw it update 3 times over 303 confirms. The last confirms were taking a long time, and it had been over an hour. I'm not sure if it was intentional or not by Poloniex, but they actually credited the first batch of depositors all at once!
I figured my deposits would get credited soon so I set a sell order assuming that I would get my deposit first. Hey, you never know. I set it to sell half of my deposit at 0.007 BTC/LSK, which would also sell into any higher bids at the same time. So I sat there for 8 minutes or so, clicking "Sell" then "OK" on the dialogue telling me "Not enough LSK."
### Buckle up it's trading time
Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of LSK hit the market. By mistake or design, all the first deposits got confirmed simultaneously. Probably some lucky and on-the-ball bastard with a ton of LSK got the first sales, taking out the high gimmick orders and blasting through the 100+ BTC market depth all the way down near 0.002. Nice profits, whoever you are. My order must have been a tiny bit behind because I found it on the ask book lumped in with a couple hundred thousand LSK from other traders with the same price I had in my mind. Damn, price is around .0022 and my unrealistic dream was 0.007, what am I gonna do? Let's see what happens.
I ended up selling the bulk of my LSK at 0.0015 BTC each, only to watch the price double to almost 0.003 seconds later, ha! That rise went through some higher orders I set and my average ended up as you see above. I went out to dinner with some friends but not before putting in a low bid to gain some LSK back for more trading, as you can see by my average buy price. When I got home it had been filled and I sold some more at 0.00063ish.
That's the story of an amateur fool throwing his money around like a magnetic boomerang to see if it comes back with more. Sometimes it does.
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refs:
Lisk Initial Coin Offering page https://ico.lisk.io/
Poloniex Twitter https://twitter.com/poloniex
Installing Lisk (using Docker) https://lisk.io/documentation?i=lisk-docs/DockerInstall
Installing Lisk (using Binaries) https://lisk.io/documentation?i=lisk-docs/BinaryInstall
Lisk bitcointalk.org thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1346646
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