There's too many landmines in this space to count. All it took to finish me off was two. Here's what happened. Why it matters to you should be pretty damned obvious by the time you're done reading. I guess it's the fate of the bagholder to sound pathetic, but keep reading anyways and pay attention.
I'm 31, disabled, and fully dependant on my mother and the U.S. govt. That's not relevant except to explain why I got into Bitcoin investing. I received an inheritance recently, enough to buy a new car. What good is that going to do me? What good are phrases like: "never invest more than you can afford to lose" when you have no choice; where $25k is the same as zero in your situation? I'll put that money to work for me, in Bitcoin. So I did. I bought in @ $120ish.
And here was my first, and biggest, mistake. I was thinking of BTC as fiat, not as a commodity itself. So I started buying BTC-TC securities imagining dividends and stock appreciation would do better than normal NYSE regulated securities. Never imagining that BTC itself would easily outpace all offerings, and worse, That it's rise would put proportional downward pressure on the value of my securities.
I was going to get out completely when an offering called Labcoin took off like a rocket, and I made my next huge mistake. I looked over the offer, the contract, the principles. The devs TheSeven and Howard Wang seemed solid enough so I went all in, I'm on the new ASICMINER train. Nope. Hindsight is a mean old witch that makes my chest hurt when I look at her.
The 900+ page Labcoin thread was a circus of pure fud and to-the-moon noise. It wasn't possible to find the signal. The daily cycle of up/down swings caused by the fud led to the destruction of massive amounts of wealth. The stress of watching the swings was physically painful. By the time the FUD became tangible fact the shares were worthless and BTC-TC had shut down and halted all trading.
What happened? Alberto Armandi (sound familiar?), Fabrizzio Tatti, and Alessia Tatti abused the reputation of TheSeven to take the community for 7,000BTC. They used a portion of that to buy 25 Bitfury rigs to make it look like they were getting something done. (Once the scam was blown open the hashing stopped, we found out why
a few days later).
182 of those BTC were once mine.
There are and will be projects worth supporting, but if you want to support them, or even *ghasp* buy stuff with BTC, then consider the potential future value first. Of the dozens of offerings and countless alt coins to "invest" in I can count the success stories on one hand, and BTC itself has outperformed all of those.
That's the story of my loss, Spring to Autumn.
Apparently I am the cliche. Don't discount the value of those words because you cannot face the abrasiveness of the one saying them. Note the lack of success stories, then re-read the comments mocking mpex for having so few actively traded assets.
Pay attention.
Edit: I have been corrected about assets that have outperformed BTC for certain periods of time.
S.MPOE, S.DICE, S.BBET, ASICMINER (arguable, but undeniably profitable), btcbond, xbond. That's probably not the whole list but the general point stands when so few come to mind when talking about BTC denominated assets.
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