Bitcoin Forum

The allure of the crypto market is undeniable. Stories of overnight millionaires and life-changing opportunities abound^[1-2]. However, this potential comes with a hefty dose of risk, often overlooked in the hype. While success stories exist, for every winner, there are countless losers^[3]. Unfortunately, in 2022, I became one of them.

This wasn't my first brush with loss. In 2018, the Credits project left me licking my wounds. However, I managed to cut my losses and move on. This time, with FTX, things were different.

FTX, with its infamous FTT token, was once a shining star. In the wake of the UST-LUNA collapse, FTX emerged as a savior, attempting to rescue struggling companies like Celsius^[4]. This, coupled with the seemingly attractive price point (around $25), convinced me that FTT had bottomed out and couldn't go lower. Blinded by optimism, I disregarded stop-loss orders, believing I'd snagged a steal.


November 2022 shattered my illusion. Accusations of user fund misappropriation sent shockwaves through the market, and FTT plummeted: the token's value nosedived over 90% in mere days^[5]. I clung to hope, but the price continued its relentless descent, even reaching $1 at one point. Finally, in January 2023, I faced reality and sold my FTT holdings at a staggering $2.50, marking a 90% loss, or roughly $900.


This experience was a harsh awakening. It exposed the fragility of trust in the crypto space. Rapidly growing exchanges, overnight sensations – everything can be a carefully crafted facade masking an elaborate scheme to exploit investors. This loss served as a brutal reminder: caution is paramount, and stop-loss orders are not optional.

I share my story not for pity, but as a cautionary tale and an invitation to share your experiences:

• Which project/token inflicted your biggest loss?
• What percentage and amount did you lose?
• How did this experience impact your investment journey?

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References:
[1] Crypto Billionaires: 11 Individuals Who Struck it Crazy Rich with Cryptocurrencies (https://www.techopedia.com/crypto-billionaires-11-individuals-who-struck-it-rich-with-cryptocurrencies)
[2] From rags to riches: 5 ordinary people who are now crypto millionaires (http://From rags to riches: 5 ordinary people who are now crypto millionaires)
[3] The Reasons Why 90% of Crypto Traders Lose Money (https://www.crypto-rating.com/forecasts/the-reasons-why-90-of-crypto-traders-lose-money/)
[4] FTX reportedly considers bailing out Celsius via asset bid (https://cointelegraph.com/news/ftx-reportedly-considers-bailing-out-celsius-via-asset-bid)
[5] Why Did FTX Collapse? Here’s What to Know (https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/10/technology/ftx-binance-crypto-explained.html)

1. It was back in 2017, a token called $COSS — supposedly an exchange token similar to FTT. I was bullish on it because apparently, it was more "regulatory compliant" compared to most exchanges, and the fact that it was the only first few exchanges that had the RaiBlocks/Nano coin, which was very hot at that time.

2. Probably more than 90%+ of my portfolio lmao fk

3. Definitely learned that being a "hodler" and not selling because of FUD doesn't work if you bought a shit investment.

I have lost so much in my life with a patient that I don't know how much logic there is in mentioning the token here or on me.  I don't know if the camera will attack but I can say this much that it is the center that invests me all in my life.  Took finance class.  .It goes without saying that Luna Runa Tog has ruined my life.  Because I did not realize that after I invested my maximum on the token, I was scammed like this.  But then slowly I adjusted myself and.  I have been able to bring myself to a good level.  I'm fine but we would have done something if there was someone else but I hope you are like this one.  Don't be fooled into buying crazy.

For me the fall of Luna since I am staking some ust stablecoin with huge apr% this gives a good rewards until everything fall apart. Now I realize that even top 7 that time on marketcap can also ruin your portfolio. Well lesson learned. Its not actually an altcoin since it should stay at stable price but sh*t happened and that will teach you a big lesson. Now Im more careful about trying to earn with passive one.

In retrospect, the crypto project that I lost the most belonged to a ponzi service Bitcoinnect :) , it's not necessarily a sad memory when I admit that at that time personal greed was really great when it was easy to make money from lending, but over time I was also swept away by it. That was a great lesson that helped me become more aware of making money and investing in cyberspace.

Although I also made a lot of mistakes in the previous cycle with FOMO following many different projects, looking back, it was also a journey of accumulating experience at the expense of my own money.

Regalcoin will ever remain a point of great loss for me. It was that era of lending coins in 2017. What makes it memorable for me isn't the loss of capital in that coin but the fact that I had to sell off my over 200 BNB to acquire it with hope of getting back on BNB from the passive income I would be getting from Regalcoin. Well, we learn everyday in this industry.

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Hah, Bitcoinnect! BCC as it was called, who was active in the crypto space in 2017 and wouldn't remember that coin? I don't think there's any. Anyway, I came out of it without a loss. I was entering the stage where I would start reaping from my invested capital when the scheme went under and that was within a period of 30 days or so after I had invested. I felt hurt anyway.

It was actually BitcoinnectBitconnect! JFC if I remember correctly, BCC stayed in the top 10(or 20?) for a bit too lang that I'd expect to be; with it being heavily shilled by YouTube influencers like Crypto Nick and Trevon James.

I lost a lot of money by investing in Sparkster, listening to Ian Balina. It seems that they were obliged to pay investors the funds, but this has not happened yet. I also have a bunch of tokens from different projects, if I had sold them in 2017-2018, I would have made a lot of money, but I decided to play "holder". Alas, it did not lead to anything good.

Something similar happened to me in 2022, but it was mostly my mistake because I FOMOed. One evening, I opened Binance and noticed that a coin/token named NMR was going straight up with no brakes, the candle just kept going up, and it increased by several $ even when I was just watching. I got curious and thought that I could make an entry and then a quick exit with a few hundred dollars in profit. So, I entered with about $2,000, and to my surprise, it started dropping right after I bought in.

Initially, I thought it might be a small dip and it would start going up again, but in a few hours, my holdings lost more than 50% of its value and I knew I f*cked up. I waited for about two months, and it didn't go up at all, then I was compelled to sell my holdings because I needed the rest of the money.

Fortunately i didn't suffer any losses due to the LUNA and FTX fiasco except maybe just a dip in Bitcoin price which is part of my portfolio. Perhaps I owe this to the lessons I learned during the 2017-2018 ICO hype, where I made some losses trying to HODL and religiously believe in ERC20 tokens  ;D

There were so many tokens I held, but the most notable one was PundiX because I was about 70% of my portfolio. I ended up selling off the tokens when the prices had totally dipped in the middle of a bear market. From then, I stopped putting most of my energy in shitcoins.

It was top 10? 🤣 well i guess coz the old days is like wild west.

Anyway my most losses is usual shitcoin i hunted in poocoin. Then also HiENS, a fractional NFT token which got down 80%. I get back about 95% of my initial money after painfully hold it for the entire bear market, lol.

Ayyy pundix fellow here.
You know that coin isn't a shitcoin like at all. It has a genuine real world product which most crypto don't have. I guess you just unlucky to bought it at the top. i think many people who invest when the market in its peak also have this problem.
In fact i plan to include them in my portfolio

I did read what you said OP, and this just shows that even the highest coins can still scam investors like what happened with FTX, and Terra Luna. Always beware and like what they're always saying, "Invest what you can afford to lose."

For me, it's Pancakeswap.

I was blinded by the fact that it was the first DEX under Binance Smart Chain, and at that time, BSC was becoming more and more popular because of NFTs and games being made under Binance. I thought that Pancakeswap would be the same as Uniswap hence, I bought it when it was around $32. Weeks passed by, and it went down, and down, and down and to cut the story short, I sold all of my CAKE tokens when the price was at $2. I guess I'm just lucky that I didn't go all in with CAKE or else, the disappointment will be much greater. Right now, I moved on from that already, and I realized that I bought it during the peak of the bull run which was my mistake. I made a mistake, and I learned from it, and I will not do it again. :)

1. I can't do basic mathematics for now but just compute. I bought it at nearly $32 and sold it at $2. :D
2. Financially, it doesn't affect me that much because like I said, I was diversified, and I only put a small amount into Pancakeswap. I would definitely say that the learnings is way more than the losses that I incur investing into that shitty token. :D

The most significant loss I ever experienced in cryptocurrencies market was with Terra Luna project that miserably collapsed in  May,2022 when its price dropped from $120 to almost zero due to failure of its stable coin to maintain its value at $1. This sudden downfall wiped out $40 Billion from the crypto market and thousands of Investors lost their life time savings. The lesson I learned from this bitter experience was to invest only in Top 20 projects and avoid taking risk in altcoins those are highly centralized to mitigate exposure to such high risk ventures.

https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/cryptocurrency/what-happened-to-terra/

1.Which project/token inflicted your biggest loss?
Luna(Tera) for the win for me. This scam token caught me off guard because I purchased most of my portfolio when they are experiencing heavy sell off. I thought their buy back mechanism can recover the price but Do Kwon exit scam and abandoned the project.

2.What percentage and amount did you lose?
Almost 80% of my portfolio which is supposed to be in Bitcoin.

3.How did this experience impact your investment journey?
Never invest on wreck ship hoping that it will recover much better to invest on project that  showing already recovery or fresh project with potential to grow.

I experienced "double dead" here when FTX & Terra Luna collapsed.
In despite of that, I moved forward and then strived more hard to get back those losses by trading, investing, and hunting hidden gems.

I am still hoping for an FTX Exchange refund like what most people do.

I have been very careful where I was going to invest my money. Actually, I would say too careful.

I do not have much experience with investing in altcoins specifically. It took me a long time to really get into cryptocurrency. Looking back, I try to pinpoint the exact reason why I was not interested in getting into cryptocurrency. Maybe it was just not interesting enough for me because it did not really sink in that you could actually make some money or get profit from cryptocurrency. Digital money, especially one that is not even considered fiat, can be hard to grasp. Sometimes it feels as if though it is not real.

I would say my biggest loss would be not investing earlier in bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies. If I had invested not only my money but also my time and effort in learning about crypto, my life would have been so different right now.

For me it was the Luna crash and it’s stable coin Depeg😢

This actually happened on my birthday Luna was down 40% and I was seeing that as an opportunity to buy the dip and I did next thing I saw was 80% drop and I said to buy again with hope that it’ll retrace back to a good position where I can sell 😆

All the losses I have experienced have become a lesson for the future to be more careful in choosing tokens or coins to invest in.
In 2017, I lost a lot of money from every coin in my portfolio. At the end of 2017, the price of Bitcoin and Altcoins again reached ATH and then I didn't sell them. In the end, as time passed, everything fell drastically. Maybe at that time I just started to save the tokens in my wallet. me, and my biggest loss was that after participating in the bounty for months there was no payment that was distributed, that was a big loss for me.

This some kind of environment and green project. It was hype back then, so I fall for it around 2018 and I thought that it will be huge. I follow every telegram and group about this project, unfortunately it was all hype and it seems that the project has died a painful death. I investment good chunk of money (I'm not going to say how big), but it was in the thousands of dollars.

So that is a big lessons for him that time, and so it's either a win or a lost for me being a investors. But what is good though is that we learn from those kind of mistakes, move on and look for the next big one. But this time you shouldn't fall for the hype, study the project and just like what we say here, DYOR (Do Your Own Investigation).

Man may you have better luck. Last time i heard about the refund, they said they will do but it will be based when btc price was 18k as it is the price when their exchange collapsed

It was with DOGE to be honest. I was one of the investors who became unrealistic and greedy for a moment that time before its market price drastically fell, in a short period of time. Same reason why I never engaged that much with meme tokens after the incident. Fortunately, I managed to hold up until now and now quite closing the gap between the loss. Just turned out to be a lesson; an expensive one. It was my fault not setting a stoploss because I overlooked at the market behavior before. Meme tokens are a good option still, if you know how to ride with the 'wave' on its market prices. I haven't make use that much of the resources such as communities of tgar token, which is an important aspect to at least lessen the chances for a huge loss.

This was just the biggest but with other coins and projects, I am also prone with loss; we all do. I experienced engaging with scam projects, dead coins, and the likes and those are just part of the process, I guess. So far I became more meticulous with the coins I am being interested with and profit comes more than loss. Especially at this point wherein bullmarket is anticipated. This is the right time to accumulate decent amounts and wait for prices to soar. But still, manage the expectations 'coz nothing will be earned easily.

They had a very good working product, but the amateurish team lost their way when they raised a lot of money during the ICO. They had no damn good idea on how to handle the project and propel it forward. Eventually they started doing some common things like token split and then creating another completely different token FunctionX, to raise more money. Fuck, i don't know what its purpose was to the project by that time, as I had completely given up on it.

The tokens dumped so hard and the volumes were so low that Binance even delisted some of their trading pairs.

I have only had 2 coins in my life that i can remember that crashed to zero when i was sleepting. Both happened when i started this cryptocurrency journey, and back then i didn't luckily have too much money on them. Even with biggest rug pulls i experienced, i either managed to cash out my initial investments when i sold them while it mooned, or managed to trade swings when it crashed.

So in theory while i lost lot of profits in in monetary value, and those were technically my biggest monetary losses, but i consider it as imaginary money, because i didn't sell in time. So when i make more money then i put in, but lose more in profits, does easy come, easy go even count?

Coins where i lost significant amount of my investments were Decent, Rise and Deep Brain. I am not surprised if you haven't heard from them. Decent even seemed like a real project, but it just faded away and no one needed it. Deep brain, which i DCA:d because at the time i had money for it, and thought it would go back up. Because at the time everything was bouncing back. It was an early AI project, during ico frenzy, and back then no one seemed to question if it was needed. Blockchain + ai was enough. That reminds me of current AI trend.
Third one was "Rise vision" That was a special kind of travesty. It was more money laundering operation than a coin.

I last bought an ico coin that was promoted through a bounty campaign on bitcointalk 2017. after that, I rarely buy ico coins. even if I buy it through binance's launchpad. in the 2017 era, every ico must be successful and even if it enters the market, its price has skyrocketed, it is definitely profitable.

🤣 Yeah i don't know what they did, it was a mess.

I can't remember them but they're like a bunch of $ 100s because that's how I invested before with many altcoins. I've learned from the experience there and I am not doing it again. I am allotting time first into research and as I suggest everyone to DYOR especially the newbies. I'm also applying that to myself. So I am putting where my mouth is and has always been remembering the mistake that I did and those altcoins that I invested a lot and diversified a lot taught me a lot of valuable lessons.