bought bitcoin for 35 to 70, sold all on the way up between 380 and 500, was criticized big time on this forum for doing so, but that is what I did.
2nd time, bought bitcoin between 280 and 300, just sold it all again for gold, silver and platinum, for approx 10% to 15% loss.
I am done with bitcoin - done! I will never hold bitcoins again, will only buy them to use immediately to pay for items. OK I lie, I held 2 bitcoins, if bitcoin goes to 10 000, it will make up for the $20 000 loss I just took, and I will exit at breakeven.
On a parting note, here are my gripes with bitcoin
1) by far the biggest gripe I have is that bitcoin is just full of scammers and shitbags. Exchanges stealing money, miners stealing money, hackers stealing money, it never ends. When you are trying to sell the general public on a pretty complicated scary concept, and all they are reading is scam this, thief that, you are done, finished, dead in the water. The PR damage has been done.
2) the winklevoss ETF fund is just too much of a risk for me to try hold bitcoin through. if this thing gets denied, bitcoin will flash crash. That winklevoss ETF is the pie in the sky everyone is hoping for so they can dump their coins onto the general public. If it doesn't get approved, a lot of people will dump anyways. The fact that since mtgox there are just more and more bitcoin scams is not good for the pending ETF approval in my opinion.
3) liquidity is horrible, really horrible. there are 14 million coins, but selling or buying 100 000 at once on any exchange will pretty much blow up that exchange to zero or infinity. 100 000 is not even 1%
4) store of value? what store of value, no one can seriously think people would invest life savings in bitcoin when it moves 10% in a day, OFTEN. this is linked to point 3.
5) technological challenges, such as miners 51%, low transactions per second, infighting among developers / community (the most scary one to me), and many more I do not want to get into.
6) dying into obscurity. The increase in traffic being seen is just people slowly realizing they better cash out is my guess. But I have no heard one person on the street mention bitcoin once in the last 2 months. Plus a good indicator is that during crashes or spikes on BTC-E the message section would be so busy you could not even read the scroll was so fast. Now? its dead. This is the point that really got me to dump, if interest is dying amongst bitcoin traders / holders / enthusiasts, how the hell will the public get excited.
7) I see no bitcoin killer app, there has been enough time for one, and there is not one.
why would someone buy something (legal) with bitcoin instead of a credit card? offers zero benefits, only downside.
I am not saying bitcoin is going to zero, for all I know it goes to $1000 or $10 000 or $1, I have no idea. But I don't feel good about bitcoin anymore.
