Why I left BTC

Jonivdb (OP)

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Why I left BTC

April 03, 2014, 08:22:01 AM

Last year in november when both bitcoin and altcoins where getting really good results I bought into bitcoin. The profits seemed amazing, and working in the IT I wanted to learn more about this coin, see if it could mean anything for me apart from making some profit.

I have experience with investing, I own quite an amount of stocks so I tought it would be interesting to see how bitcoin compares with the stock market.

I invested 500€, at the time bitcoin was around 800$. For me 500€ was not a big amount, it's quite small compared to what I have in stocks. But I knew that what I invested I should be prepared to lose.
Of that amount I put half into alt coins.
One of the altcoins being Quark. You all know that story, people were shouting on the forums it would break all records. Quark was by far my biggest disappointment. It was a very poor investment on my side that I should have seen coming. But that's easy to say now ofc.
After that I decided to convert all altcoins back to bitcoin. This must have been around Christmas. I didn't made really huge profits or losses with doing so, apart from the quarkcoin. I had invested 70€ in Quark, and lost about half of that. In % this is quite high a loss.

I waited for several months, following coinmarketcap. I enjoyed watching all developments, and learned that the markets where actually quite predictable. A coin that rose with 1000% was likely to drop far more in just a few days.
I learned that like Quarkcoin, there are still plenty of scams around that trick enough people into buying and then dump (pump & dump). Auroracoin was the latest I followed. I saw it rising to what? 40$? More? Now it's back to 2$, and all the way down people were shouting that people that sold were stupid.
I also learned that the course of, alt-coins especially, can be manipulated by selling really low or buying really high.
And I learned that even the big players here, are not safe for hackers. Many sites have been hacked, and many more will be. Even if you store your bitcoins safe & local, the price will still be affected every time there is a hack.
I never really liked the fact that half of the bitcoins are owned by 100 people. In this way bitcoin is not much different then "real" money, where half of the global money is owned by 100 people.

In stocks I have a few simple rules:
- if a stock drops 10% consider to sell
- if a stock drops 20% consider to sell or have good arguments why not
- if a stock doesn't give you any profit for 3 months it is unlikely it will give you profit over the course of the year, so consider to sell

For a while I ignored this wisdom, I think the volatility of the market did affect my judgement here. It fell to over 20% loss for a few times. At one point I had a 60% loss(!), after it dropped a few times.
I was waiting and holding, thinking that it does have some potential. Then the bancrupty of MtGox went down. I couldn't ignore it anymore, I hadn't made a loss, it was down 20% and there was no sign of any good news that would allow for a recovery.
I sold, the value was at that point 670$ I took a loss of 30%.

I did enjoy the time I played around with these virtual currencies. Bitcoins are a cool & nice toy, but that's what it is, and once people stop playing with it I don't think the market will hold.

Since then I did kept checking the market seeing red figures nearly every day, with the exception of a few pump & dumb coins. Right now it's at 450$ I believe, so I feel like I made the right decision.

I wanted to write down my story. You only read success story's, people who made huge profit, who got in near the start. I wanted to show that you shouldn't invest now to make a profit. Buy it to play with it sure and find out what this coin is that everyone talks about, but since your buying in late expect to make a loss.

jtsnau

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