I also shared this on reddit earlier today:
https://www.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/7acprc/lost_basically_my_entire_investment_last_night/Please try to learn from my story. I tried to make it a video, but I am not that great on camera, so I just made a short video here:
https://youtu.be/6d6lJ_PxpW4Right now I am sick to my stomach, I cannot sleep, and can barely function. After losing money left and right, I finally tipped last night and lost the last bit of a big chunk of my savings that I had ‘invested’ in Cryptos. This story is very hard for me to tell, because I am ashamed. Ashamed of how naive I have been, and how I made mistake, after mistake, after mistake.
A bit about me, just so you can see this could happen to anyone. My name is Ryan and I am from Canada, so don’t get too confused if I sometimes talk in CAD and sometimes in USD. I am typically a logical person, I have a degree in Computer Science, and I was always the guy saving his money. Not to the point of being cheap, but I wouldn’t spend money on myself, I would skip going out for lunch, or walk \ take the bus somewhere to save that extra cash. And in the past, I made incredibly risk averse investments, to the point of getting beat out by inflation most of the time.
Story starts about 2 months ago when I hear that Bitcoin was at around $4400, I had heard about it many times before, but as I said, I was never the one to risk investing. Finally I took the plunge, and invested my savings, many thousands into ETH and BTC. My plan was just to buy ‘safe’ coins, and invest long term. I didn’t expect to get rich anytime soon…
Soon after I did this, the crypto markets tanked. Im sure you all remember, everything fell to around the BTC $3000 and lower, I lost a ton. Not being used to this, I started scrambling to figure out how I could make it back, no idea if BTC would rise back up. I started ‘day trading’ cryptos, but I somehow made every mistake. At first I was buying based on if I thought the coin had actual merit, and a real use case (ripple, LTC, WTC, some ICOs etc.). But I just lost money, seemed I bought everything when it was up. My ICOs (like LAT) would end up being worth ½ of what I paid for them or less. Even my ETH, something I thought for sure would hold more value than BTC, was staying below my buy in point of around $340. When BTC started going back up, most of my portfolio was in other coins! I was too slow to react. Losing more money. So then I stepped back and thought, okay if this isn’t working how are other ppl making money? Sounds logical right?
After lurking on reddit, it seemed like rumours were really running most of the markets, they didn’t always pan out, but when they did it was big. This could have just been the small sample size I was looking at, but it felt real to me. So I started looking for rumours, and of course I lost more money. At this point I am starting to get desperate to make my funds back, I had tried scraping the markets volatility a bit before. Just place a sell order a bit above the market and then a buy order a bit below. But it only kinda worked, I would win some, but in general I didn’t have the time or the money to put into it. So I figured maybe there are bots that I can get to do this. Again I wasn’t thinking of getting rich overnight, just slowly making my money back. This is how I lost another big chunk. After googling for some bots I found a site called Carismo.biz that you would just invest your funds with them and they would use bots to make you money. Makes sense, but I was still skeptical of course. I tried with a smallish investment, and it actually started working. Not super fast, but fast enough that it had me hooked. I invested more. Till one day the site just stopped working... It was gone, all gone.
After some searching I found a whole other market of what they call HYIPs, but that’s a very friendly name for them. As should have been obvious to me... they are pyramid or ponzi schemes. The site exists for just long enough to get noticed, paying ppl with funds that others invest, then it vanishes with everyone's money.
So now, I am just emotional, making choices with little or no consequence. Still following rumours cause I figure what the hell, it could work? Late last night I moved a bunch of money onto yobit.net because there was some coin that I was hearing rumours about, who even knows what coin it was now. I noticed they had a Dice Game, with no limit. Just press a button and you have a 48% chance to double your money... I didn’t lose it all at once, that would have been too easy. I knew the basic but seemly ‘foolproof’ Fibonacci or martingale strategy. Add the last 2 or more losses together, and keep betting higher and higher only when you lose sequentially. I would start at 0.0001BTC and that way my limit was high enough that I had to come out ahead… it worked for a few hours, I was up 0.2BTC or so or about $1200. Amazing! But this was no where near the amount I had lost over the last few days \ months, so I kept going. But eventually the streak hit, I bet more and more to recoup it, until I was at 0.64BTC for one roll, but enough lost bets before that to double it. I wasn’t even thinking about this being my last full BTC, and how much it was worth. I don’t know what came over me, I should have stopped long before that number, I should have never even started. It was just so easy to hit ‘Roll’. I was blind. I lost ~$8000 instantly. Might not seem like a lot of money to some of you, but I know to others it’s massive, and I am one of those.
I stayed home from work today to write this, I knew there was no way I could face anything after these mistakes. Hopefully someone else can learn from this. I am sure this story or something similar has happened to others before. But you do not hear it enough. The shame stops you from telling it.
Today my portfolio is about 0.4 of a BTC, a little ETH and a handful of ico coins, who knows what will happen with them. I am not sure what to do. If anyone has any advice or help they could give me, I will listen. Should I exit everything? Or Just step back? Uninstall Blockfolio, and hold what little I have left? Some might even say I should buy back in, borrow against my credit cards and line of credit. I know there is a voice in the back of my head still telling me to do that. What else do I have to lose?
TLDR: Despite being a smart and logical person, I fell prey to the get rich quick hype and lost roughly $18,000CAD of my initial investment by every manner available: badly timed investments, icos, HYIPs, and finally the yobit Dice Game last night.
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