Were you one of them? Would be interesting to hear your story. Was it a wild ride for you? How did you manage? What are you doing now?
I don’t waste much time thinking about it, I know I would have sold at $4, or $8, or $1000 and then just been kicking myself as it hit new highs. Better to have just lost it completely and have the story to tell.
Then the price hike in 2013 came and I was reminded of bitcoin again. Sadly the wallet was stored on a harddrive that was wiped sometime in 2011. 52 bitcoins had basically no value when I got them, but that clearly changed.
I lost 15 ETH writing a faulty script to trade automatically on EtherDelta, when that was still a thing. Their UI was (intentionally?) poor and didn't have client-side checks to ensure people weren't fat fingering their trades. It also didn't have an automatic market maker. So, if someone typo'ed an order, the typo'd order would sit on the books as there wasn't a process to automatically match overlapping bid/asks. As a user, this meant you would sometimes see free money literally sitting there waiting to be clicked and taken.
So I thought I'd automate the process and trade for the typo automatically. This didn't work out so well. First, it turns out there were other bots running already. Since it was all on-chain, the gas price you bid determines your transactions in-block priority. So, all the bots were trapped in a game theory dilemma. If there was a $10,000 typo, and all you need to do is submit "Yes", then how much should you pay to try and beat others to saying yes? Well, if you're the only participant, then you pay $0. If you're one of 2 participants then you pay $5,000. If you're one of 3 then $3,333.33, etc. The issue? You don't know how many other bots are out there.
This situation has weird outcomes. There was actually free $10k+ trades sitting there to be taken. They were actually being taken, but those taking were never the ones profiting. Instead, it was the ETH miners receiving huge priority tips that were making out like bandits... but if all the unprofitable bots ever gave up then, suddenly, there would be free money once again.
Anyway. The EtherDelta service was comprised of two wallets. One was within their smart contract and one was external. You place bids with money that you moved inside their smart contract, but you pay your bid's gas with money you kept outside their smart contract. I ran my code for a while, thought it seemed OK enough to run overnight, and, just before bed, decided that "to be safe" I would move most of my money from in-contract to out-of-contract. This would make it so that I didn't wake up to a ton of lost money because my bot wouldn't have a ton of money to trade with.
Unfortunately, there was an edge case in my code that would cause the bot to try and place a bid and fail in a way that burned gas. That edge case came up while I was sleeping and my bot burned through all my gas. This wouldn't have been an issue if I had left my money where it was originally, but, because I moved it all to the wallet which was used to pay for gas, I ended up burning a bunch of ETH in gas overnight.
One time I got hacked by downloading a RAT off a torrent for a virtual machine and lost 10,000 ETH, now worth like $20,000,000.00 so that was annoying.
Then of course just the price swings, I'm down nearly $2million since the high point, so is that "lost"?
Never was stupid enough to buy an NFT, even though I TRIED to convince myself. That was just such a stupid time to be in crypto and I'm glad those people lost all that money. Morons.
Now I'm 100% XMR and BCH, they are the ONLY cruptoCURRENCIES that work and are needed, literally everything else in the space is a scam to take your money.
Around 2012-13 a lot of us would talk fervently about how BTC would take over. We all wanted to have at least 21 BTC to be "in the club". I like to think we all kept our promise to each other and are still in the club :)
Then I realized it would never be useful as a currency due to the Bitcoin cap making it deflationary.
I still don't disagree, and most of Bitcoin is speculation and fraud, but the correlation of Bitcoin being deflationary is that the value will only go up.
So, Doink.
My read on it at the time was that it was an ideological project from a pseudo-right tech libertarian sphere that I have always despised. At that point you could not yet use it to buy illegal porn and drugs on the internet, but the people who were into bitcoin were SO EXCITED that you soon would be able to.
I figured it would never be useful. I was right about all of that, I think? I didn't predict that people would get rich from it despite these things though. I like to think it wouldn't have changed anything for me.
How do you know how long to hold?
I bought a bunch of bitcoin for under $100 each and sold them for ~$1000 each at one point.
Should I have held them longer? Sure, but how could anyone really know that? How do you resist the urge to realize the >10x gain in a short term?
After it went up to ~1200 it crashed down to 200-300 for years before it recovered and skyrocketed to new heights.
If you had bought bitcoin for something low like say $100, are you telling me you would really have resisted selling it when it hit $1000? or $2000? How about when it hit $10,000 or $25,000 or even $50,000? Knowing that it could come crashing down at any second as well.
The peak was nearly 70K, and now it's only about half that.
So simply holding isn't a complete strategy.
2. Yes, you made a mistake. Use the "Rake Method" many of us have preached for a decade. No guessing needed, profit taking can even be automated. It's all very simple.
3. Yes, a great buying opportunity.
4. Yes, I bought a lot around $150's. Using the rake method you can't go wrong. If it's more cash than I need I buy gold. Easy. Angin, the research is already done, and we have a solution to your issues, the rake method.
I assume you have a net worth > $100M right? as it's so easy.
Not sure why in 2023 people keep saying it "doesn't work". Why say that? BCH just works and always has since 2009.
BCH didn’t exist in 2009
I'm not even upset, I have negative feelings towards crypto in general and that was a part of reason for selling. Everyone I know who is into crypto was always excited NOT to pay taxes. Plus, there is just so much scams and fraud in the space. I'm all in index funds now.
I do know a guy who became a millionaire because of BTC.
The crypto world is indeed a rollercoaster ride, with both exhilarating highs and heart-stopping lows. I'd love to hear more stories about how individuals managed and adapted during these wild swings and what they're up to now.
In case you want to mint, create or show your art, Rather Labs at https://www.ratherlabs.com could be a valuable resource for insights and solutions.