Bitcoin Forum

Me? I bought a few coins on MtGox a few weeks ago for $165 and was the second highest bidder before a ~>30% crash. Woops  ::)

Feel free to post pictures worth 1,000 descriptions of 'bad luck'.

I bought tons of shit worth 300 bitcoins about 2 weeks before BTC started rising from ~10$ to ~260$ . Well... I was pretty pissed.

I could have made over ~75k dollars =)

Once upon a time I sold 200 coins at $0.91

It didn't seem like $1 was possible again after the initial news faded about hitting dollar parity.

same i guess, sold it too cheap when I had a lot of them

Not looking into it earlier!  ;)

I stopped mining and forgot about bitcoin 2 years ago. Now that small amount of btc which at the time i thought was not worth the hassle to convert to my currency is worth 200+usd. It took ~4 days to mine that...

Bought high. Crash. Sell low. - Repeat x3. Lost only about $1k but that's a lot to me. I have terrible luck despite watching clark.moody before trading.

not buying a crapload of them in 2011 when i downloaded my wallet and got a free 0.05 from a faucet, in all honesty i forgot about btc for about 18 months ...

Not using MFA on my mtgox account and getting cleaned out by a hacker.

Won't do that again

TIL about the yubi key - interesting...

Happened to me. Bought BTC when it was $255, and then the crash happened. I didn't sell. I invested in cheaper bitcoins to bring my average down. Now my BTC average cost is around $155 to break even. Not going to sell at $155 though. Going to hold on.

I gave up playing the markets, could never make much, always lost a lot. I just took my bit coins and bought ASICMINER stock and BTC bond with them and now i get some dividends each week. Easier, less stressful and in my case more profitable

Not getting in sooner!  I had heard about bitcoin for some time but it fell off my radar until I heard it jumped literally over night.  At that point I thought I was too late but stayed in tune, now I am attempting to buy up cheap coins, but Dwolla and MTGox are a pain in the ass.  Cash Deposit at Walmart through bitinstant, I considered, but given some of the horror stories I have read, I stay away from that method of getting coins.  Currently mining LTC with hopes that its price will rise, but buying BTC for now.

Not getting in sooner - I hear ya!

I was actually paying attention to bitcoin in 2011 before and during the first bubble. Stupidly thought "I don't have money to invest in this right now"...

Not getting interested in Bitcoin back when I first heard about it in 2009 or so. To think of all coins I could have mined back then! And I'm the kind of person who never throws anything digital away (I still have files copied from 5.25" floppies that were written in the late 80's) so I'd have been one of those guys who mined 10,000 BTC back in the day and still had a copy of that wallet.

I had ~400 coins between Pirate@40 and Hashking T-T

Not on BTC, but on LTC I lost over 1500$ in big crash. 2 mistakes: havent sold when it started to fall. When it was 1.60 I thought it shall hit lower than 1$, so sold. It went up and I lost in that 2 transactions over 1500$... And I am not rich guy, was pissed off, but that is life. You can make 1 mistake, but 2 in a row get your pockets empty :(.

I originally got into BTC pretty early on so my worst mistake was probably overestimating the gov and underestimating the community, I had never thought we'd reach this stage.

bought some heroin with btc. now :-[ i'm hooked.

Saw pictures of bitcoin mining rigs on reddit three years ago, thought well if I need 20 gpus there is no point me trying. If only I had started mining then.

hearing about btc years ago and not really taking the time to understand it... drrrrrr.....

Looked into mining when BTC came out, thought it wasn't worth it.
Looked into mining a year ago, though it might not be worth it.

Didn't buy BTC last year when it was ~$10/BTC -  I could have bought about 200 BTC
Then didn't buy as may ASICMINER shares as possible - could have bought 1600 shares for 200BTC
So I don't get about 12BTC a week dividend ($1400 a week...) and an I don't have shares currently worth about 1920BTC - or about $230K.

FML.

Build my own computer (not just for mining)
but I bought terrible graphic cards for mining (His 7970 H797QM3G2M, 2 for 950$ in total, hashrate is merely 560 kh/s, scrypt)

Someone sent me some coins way back in the beginning days but I didn't understand it.  I kept trying to tie it to something physical like gold hidden in the ground buried somewhere.

So I lost track of the wallet with the coins that are now probably worth at least 15 times what they were back then!  And this is today's value, so imagine how much they might have been worth a day or two before the crash...

Sold a bunch around xmas when they were 13 dollars a piece, then more when they hit 20.. *facepalm*

I remember seeing something about BitCoin about 4 years ago. I thought it would not really take off....

Guess I was wrong.

My worst so far is buying 6 Bitcoins at $150 for them to lose about 33%

Cant say i am too bothered though as i know exactly how much i am willng to invest in this game so any losses are expected

As many have mentioned, waiting too long.  I was going to put $10K in LTC at about $0.40 but wimped out. 

Hindsight is great but I've learned if you don't take a little risk (only that which you can afford) there is no return :)

Had 13 BTC on Bitfloor before the hack.... not a ton I know...but transferred 10 in the day before. the good news is I got like .4 back.... before Roman shut it down again.

I bought a few BTC at $10 a couple years ago and sold them at $30.
Why didn't I buy more and/or hold? Haunts me every day.

~6000 here -.-

To have a time machine to go back and kick myself in the balls, I had faith in bitcoin back then I should never have handed them over to anyone (There is a lesson here newbies, If your coins aren't in your wallet, they are not your coins)

I will probably never have near that many again.

-Blinded by greed.
*back to quietly licking my wounds*

Similar. I became fascinated with bitcoins in late 2010 or early 2011, but didn't think it'd be worth the power cost to run the miner. Even with my circa-2010 imac, surely I'd have hit it lucky at least once in over 2 years. If I'd known about mining pools back then, I'd probably have joined one and let it slowly trickle in.

And 500~ here too.  :'(
I was naive.

I remember hearing about bitcoins years ago too, what makes the pain even greater is that I could have mined so much with my 6990.

Thinking fontas is a nice guy...

I mined for a week back when it was 2 dollars and thought the outcome was quite insignificant and deleted my wallet lol. I think it was only 2.5 btc or so. But the time lost not mining is the biggest thing.

I read a story that will make everyone feel better. A guy back when they didn't amount to anything bought two pizzas for 5,000 bitcoins each. He had to convince the guy to take it too. Yes, you did the math right (I assume). Sold at the spiking time last month it would have been over 2 million.

selling...ever

I have been on Cyprus recently during the Euro-Crash and I haven't done my homework on time to prepare that days. I have underestimated one real huge value regarding BC in comparison to real money: it's anonymous for both: sellers and buyers.

Bought @ $10 and used them to buy stuff with. (Consumables) Even saw the One ounce silver rounds with 10BTC for around $160-$170 and thought, there is no way Im paying $50+ per ounce for silver (spot @ the time was $33 per oz)

Then watched the BTC go up and up, and silver down and down.

Currently Silver -<$25  BTC <$100  ish

Why so bullish on silver looking back.....

Tried to see how much I could get for all of my coins on gox and accidentally hit sell at 90.04 now they are at 98

Sold some at 97 today as the market starts its revival back to 130

^^^
Too early to tell on that one Mate!

Knowing about it in 2009 already and thinking it wasn't interesting enough to waste electricity and CPU on it.

That's my biggest mistake also :P

luckily my biggest was buying just beofre the recent crash but managed get rid of them all bar 1btc, so all in all im still in a +ve :). I tend to play with money im prepared to lose. So im enjoying the ride so far :)

Not believing in it earlier....

I certainly regret not investing more into BTC back in 2011 when I started mining. But I don't see that as a mistake -- back then, I made my calculations, and decided that a sum of X was what I was ready to risk on this venture. It's always easy to hit yourself over the head when looking at the past, but when you are in the moment decisions are all about managing risk and reward.

To put things into perspective -- right now the price hovers around $100. It could go up to $1000 next year, or it could go down to $0. How do you invest? It's the exact same spot you were a year ago when the price was $10 and then it went off the charts. All you can do is carefully evaluate your own situation and decide how much is too much. One thing though -- watch out for scams, they do seem prevalent in this community (like any pioneering "wild wild west" place); I feel sorry for everyone who fell in pirate40's trap, just keep alert!

Same as most people, knew about it since it's beginnings and didn't believe in it, could've been a millionaire now if I invested 100 $ in it before, I also mined for a bit but gave up and lost the wallet, again, thinking it wouldn't really go anywhere, if only i would've taken the risk  :(

Another one: forgetting to switch to the "sell" tab in Mt. Gox, so accidentally buying instead of selling <facepalm>

You are indeed a wise newbie. Hope you managed to catch some near $55.

i sold my most of bitcoins very cheap a year ago.  5$ for each.

Ouch!

leaving too much fiat and BTC on Bitcoin-24

looks like I have a fair chance of having it returned but the stress was unwelcome.

Not getting into it when I first heard about it.

Sold my 100BTC back when they were worth 5$ each.  :-[

Yeah in that respect I missed out on the boom too. I once had 17,000 BTC but most of them sold for $5.

biggest mistake is spending the money on mtgox

I often succeed in cutting gains but fail to cut loss

Sweet Jesus.

It'd be worth your while finding the guy and getting them back or offering a bounty of half your recovered coins to someone? Heck, why not create a thread and offer that bounty here. I'm sure someone looking for up to 3000BTC would be happy to do it.

We have tried that offering significantly more than 50% (for either Trendon Shavers or Sam J Theofanopoulos). No-one bites. If you are interested I'm 100% certain we can come to an arrangement.

Agreed. I'm sure I can get more people to chip in their %'s if it's a possible deal.

Finding him is probably the easiest part.

Getting the Bitcoins out of him legally might be more difficult.

i was active in the bitcoin community in 2010... i could have bought bitcoins for like 20 cents each and i wanted too. I didnt buy because getting mt gox funded was soo damn complicated.

if it was simpler to fund mtgox i would be a millionaire right now. Talk about a noob mistake.

Like so many others on here, I briefly came across Bitcoin mining 3 or so years ago - about the same time I came across Folding. Built and ran a Folding machine for a year or so and didn't bother without building a Mining Rig, as I deemed the power/hardware cost to be too high relative to return (back when people were regularly mining 0.5Bitcoin per day but Bitcoins were worth around $2 - and thought I was doing the world a good deed by Folding). Absolutely kicking myself now that I didn't run a Mining Rig for a few years - would have earnt in the vicinity of 500 Bitcoins since then, give or take :( = around $50k plus (or $100k plus if I had sold at the right time).

why don't you guys pay him a visit?

i don't see whats holding you back.

i would hunt him down for far less.

Don't forget to take your $5 wrench ;)

[insert relevant xkcd comic]

Many reasons. For one I live very far away.

I can offer you 50% of every Bitcoin you recover* for me and am completely certain many other will do too. Interested?

* For clarity: I am not asking you to break any laws and am therefore not liable if you choose to do so on your own accord.

Bought in at 268 cause bought with a local guy. Immediately after the price dropped. Convinced my friend to buy also. We each dropped $6000 USD on btc at that price point.

This is not a mistake as long as you don't sell.

Bought 1 BTC at 165$ just before the recent drop.

Played SatoshiDice without really knowing what I was doing, then lost almost 0.2 BTC. Had to play again and again and again (thanks stupid martingale strategy) to recover my loss, and finally won my bets back + 0.001 BTC.

And lastly, I installed a Google Chrome extension that would trade for me on Mt.Gox to automatically make some profit (yes, I really thought it could work), lost 0.2 BTC, bought back at current market price, forgot about the fees, waited for the price to get low again, and finally made 0.01 BTC of profit with all those transactions.

I think I'm done with noob mistakes. :D

people who bought in at the peak of the $30 bubble are doing pretty well right now, i wouldn't worry about it too much.

Worst newbie mistake ever.

GPU mining when it first became available while at the same time writing bitcoin off as neat little experiment.
The wallet.dat has been reformatted down at least three separate times.

Formatting a harddrive with a 20BTC wallet on it :(

I got back into mining in March 2013 - after a 9 month break - just as my last pool folded - mtred.

It was brilliant, I never had any complaints.

Unfortunately, looking for another PPS pool, I settled on Eclipse Mining (EMC) - run by Inaba.

I never knew anything about him or BF Labs before.

From the start, large blocks of my shares would randomly disappear and I wouldnt get paid for them. No reply from the admin (Inaba) and noobs trolling on their forum telling me it must be my fault 'just because' (no logical reasons given) and also saying that the safest place to keep your btc is at your EMC wallet - eg. only idiots use offline/backed-up wallets, etc.

A quick search of the forum showed other posts from users who'd lost shares. The best reply they got was Inaba saying that it must be their fault (not EMC'S), that he wasn't even going to bother checking if the fault was EMC'S and saying that the shares had gone 'poof'.

He tried this scam with me, (he'd finally replied after I posted that EMC was a scam) until I told him that I may be new to his pool but I am not new to mining.

His final reply was that I had an 'unusual' worker name and again the missing shares were my fault and that maybe changing my worker name would fix it! He also then went on to mock my worker name.
The crap that he spews is unreal. My worker name was the very unusual Silentflute.

Anyway, went to Slush's with no probs, then settled on 50BTC pool.

I thought scammers like EMC/Inaba wouldnt last long in this game but, beware everyone, wherever there is cake, the crap-sucking flies are all around trying steal a crumb.

Lesson learnt: don't believe a word Inaba/EMC says.

Awwwww Yeah:
http://xkcd.com/538/ (http://xkcd.com/538/)

Yes, my point being, what are you actually going to do when you meet this guy? Do you seriously think you will be able to get bitcoins out of him?

My first time buying a Bitcoin was on ebay,  I had no idea what I was doing and ended up paying $3.65 for 0.001 (.13 cents at the time) looool!

New ATH: $3650/BTC!

my mistake was sold I sold 5 BTC @ $30 each when prices were rising  :o

Not getting into bitcoin mining when a friend recommended years ago.

BEFORE I might need to post sad stories in the next year, listen ladies and gentlemen, what do we need to learn from this:
http://www.coinchoose.com/
???

Why the feathercoin, Freicoin, Mincoin, Bytcoin Litecoin and co are indicated as more profitable than BC???


Coin   Algo   Blocks   Difficulty   Reward   Best Price (BTC)   Exchange   % Profitability of BTC
 Feathercoin   scrypt   31089   122.352   200   0.004000000   Bter.com   263.54%
 Freicoin   SHA-256   26352   37346.892   229.75004659   0.000990000   Bter.com   245.47%
 Mincoin   scrypt   47110   1.519   2   0.003100000   mcxNOW   164.51%
 Bytecoin   SHA-256   16861   8948.631   50   0.000670000   Bytecoin Exchange   150.89%
 Litecoin   scrypt   346424   482.51251079   50   0.032000000   Bter.com   133.65%
 PPCoin   SHA-256   46303   388718.077   400.44961824746   0.002660000   BTC-e   110.45%

I don't get the reference measure in percentage here. In percentage of what?
risks? invested $ £ @ ??? Please help, so I don't need to post another Worst/Unluckiest noob mistake with digital currency

thanks a lot

Finding out about bitcoins 4 years too late

Ditto. I just got started a week ago, and I would have loved to have been working with the growing currency as it became more popular, especially when everything was easier and you could make a GPU system without needing to worry about Asics making it utterly not worth it. I would have liked to been involved and watched what happened when someone figured out how to mine with GPU's ect.

I wouldn't necessarily call this a bad thing. Because if you had stayed, you could have converted the currency you got earlier for a lot less than the $200+. The question is, if you had stayed and gotten more, would you have converted it, which for most people would be yes, and if you converted it as you went, would you still have gotten that $200+ by today taking in all costs.

I believe the table represents a simple formula.  The newer coins are more profitable to mine than Bitcoin because, although they are worth less than Bitcoin per coin, they have a higher reward for mining.  That is because most coins favor early adopters.  Typically they start off with high rewards then drop over time.  Bitcoin is one of the older coins now, so it has less rewards.

Another possible interpretation is that the market is shifting toward the possible adoption of new coins.  Bitcoin is so much huger than the other coins that it is almost a monopoly of the market.  Look how small the other values are in the Best Price column.  The other coins are trying to break out and become second coin to Bitcoin, like a new search engine trying to compete with Google.  Since the other coins have almost the same qualities as Bitcoin, they are adequate substitutes (except not accepted in as many places), and so people are bidding them up in speculation that some might succeed.

The percentage is a simple formula compared to Bitcoin.  If you mine Feathercoin for 24 hours and exchange your Feathercoin for Bitcoin, you are expected to earn 272% of what you would have earned if you mine Bitcoin directly.

I personally would recommend that you invest in a few handfuls of any coin that shows a pulse, and hold for the long term.  You have no idea which coin will succeed or fail.  Get them while they are cheap.  And if you are mining, mine the top one on the list, Feathercoin.

You can merge mine coins that use the same algorithm.

I'm going to start selling BTC on ebay:)

Ouch! That one stings. Definitely selling extremely too early would be my worst mistake, lost alot of capital.

In my head I see someone being shaken till Bitcoins fall out of him but I suspect this isn't how it happens in real life.

Excuse me as I don't know the history of this story, but isn't this what the police are for? Should be possible to prove fraud in this case?

It's a very long story most of which I've forgotten.

You're best off looking it up. Trendon Shavers - pirateat40.

The only relevant detail would be if he falsely represented his dealings (which I think he did). If so then fraud charges are possible but no-one seemed to want to do it. Not sure why.

Okay, I will spend some time to chose one of the more sexy hot winners from that digital currency contest. It seems a bit as it works in the good old investors world with eary and late investors, its the same mechanismen, I believe.

Thanks to both of You for the clarifications above.

What are Your most important criteria's when chosing one of these toys? publicity? tradeability? easy to mine? seriousity and references of the founders? quality of the technical or financial story?

What are the killer criteria's getting believers in the crypto-currency community?

thanks a lot, I am fast learning here.

M.

Haha na it did go back up predicted my own mistake :D
Well Rebought in at 110 And sold for more cash
But less bitcoins worth more so still a mistake
But I guess reading the thread my worst mistake is not learning about bitcoin earlier
Or maybe its not investing in one or all of the alt currencies in small amounts since I don't know what will win and just have 10 wallet accounts :)

[/quote]

why don't you guys pay him a visit?

i don't see whats holding you back.

i would hunt him down for far less.
[/quote]

In New Jersey, we would make him an offer he can't refuse.

I wish I had heard about it, and gotten into it sooner.

Not buying ASICMINER shares I was offered at 0.3BTC each - I thought x3 IPO price was "a tad too much", what a fool I was ;)

I was all in on BTC and was about to sell at ~$240, but decided to wait a few more days. Ended up cashing most of it out at around $130. I hedged what I still had in for a few days on bitfloor, and went all cash right before they closed. Now I'm waiting to get my $2k out. Not as bad as it could have been though if I didn't cash out everything else first.

My biggest mistake is that I did not buy BitCoin when it was almost worthless... lol

But, this is bitcoin.

Even the police could have the world's biggest pile of $5 wrenches, but I highly doubt even they would be able to get your bitcoins back.

Trying my hand at playing the alt coin market on btc-e. I am terrible at it.

Not being suspicious of people who take on more than 2+ loans that are quite big.

Deleting a Virtual Machine with 5 coins left in wallet.

some of these have cost alot of people alot of money :/

loosing 2 btc on an old usb stick that gave up :(

I was asleep and woke up when mtgox hit ~260 and i went back to sleep only to wake up to anarchy.. Should have gotten out of bed and sold!

This is why I personally prefer online wallets like blockchain.info. I know they have their disadvantages too, but I'd rather have my coins in an account than a file.

Bought BTC 2 weeks ago when it was at $260... It has never reached that level again... And I had lost 75% of my investment in 2 days time...

Bought one BTC for $250.  :-[

Lesson learned should be to sell in increments on rises, not to put all your eggs in one basket :)

My biggest mistake was ignoring bitcoins when they were $1-10 and a buddy of mine was trying to convince me to invest in them. Back then I never imagined they would come as far as they have today.

bought a ncie share of bitcoins back in the day. formatted computer. FML

Selling my bitcoins for well under the ask price.

I was holding 100+ bitcoins last summer. Got rid of them not long after. Obviously kicking myself when the price exploded. But that's life I guess.