Confession: I Could Have Made $128 Grand in Bitcoin But Lost $1,500. | Hacker News Reader

Confession: I Could Have Made $128 Grand in Bitcoin But Lost $1,500.

chrisnorstrom.com

19 pointsChrisNorstrom10 comments

In the summer of 2011 I spent my life savings on Bitcoins. Took me about two years of following the ins and outs of the community before taking the plunge.

Shortly thereafter I lost my job and had to do a fire sale of everything to keep pushing and living in a city that is now more expensive than New York City.

Back then, to me, bitcoins were worthless.

I couldn't pay rent, my landlord laughed.

I couldn't buy food, no one even heard of it.

It was still too nerdy, showing people a long chain of non-sensical numbers and letters didn't elicit confidence that I am a sane enough person to not pay for goods and services with dollar bills.

So I decided to sell all of my bitcoins.

The exchange I bought the coins from went bankrupt but the operators were decent enough to at least cut a check for me. A year later.

But I could have been a millionaire. Could have been somebody!

Then again, when I think about it, really think about it I missed out on:

- first dot com boom

- first round of war profiteering

- housing market boom

- second internet boom

- second round of war profiteering

- the forex boom

- the gold boom

- AAPL

- GOOG

To quote the greatest warrior-poet of our generation, Kanye West: Now everything I'm not, made me everything I am.

So, what you're saying is... be ready to pounce on the third wave of war profiteering? ;)

Lesson Learned #4: The chart does not always go up, it will come down eventually. Be careful not to be the one that goes down with it. Nothing just keeps getting bigger. It will eventually deflate.

Yes, eventually every bubble will deflate - and arguably BTC is a bubble. But, that said, no one knows how big the bubble is going to get, or when it'll burst, or how bad it'll be when it does. It might burst tomorrow, fall to $50, and confidence will be so screwed that it never recovers to anything like the level it's at now. Maybe. Alternatively though, it might continue to grow to $10,000/BTC and then deflate to $5,000. Investing now would still represent a fantastic return after then crash.

I suspect that when the bubble does burst it won't actually be that bad for the reason that it's quite hard to get your money out of BTC. Exchanges are slow - a sell order can take hours or even days in rare cases. Consequently, people aren't likely to be able to cut their losses quickly, so they'll end up with BTC they can either sell on at a huge loss, or keep. People will keep them in case they go back up. That supply side limiting will stop the market collapsing completely. Markets can only collapse as quickly as people can pull their money out.

That said, I don't own any, so my speculation is irrelevant.

This sort of thing (possibility of making it big and losing instead) could be true of any number of stocks or other investments. How is this a story at all?

OP hasn't learned he is not a beautiful and unique snowflake.

OP is sharing some lessons in life. Take em or leave em. There's hundreds of songs or stories about loving someone and losing them. Even though such things happen to everyone we don't dismiss the story just because it isn't unique.

Blogging is fine, but submission of posts to a news aggregator is opening the door to judgments as to its usefulness, veracity, and/or uniqueness.

If I wrote some random post about how great I thought C was and I've been coding for a couple weeks, I shouldn't expect it to get good reception here. In addition, you add some pretty blatant "donation" crap at the end and its clear the subtext of the article is self-marketing.

tl;dr. Yes I can and will dismiss this story because it isn't unique.

I could have made 150,000 euros, but instead the polish authorities (oddly) closed BTC24s exchange bank account while i was trading.. so instead i'm left with 10,000 euros (or at least the promise i'll get it back one day)

Your article is great btw, v. good points.

I'll bet this story is common.

Reminds me a little of the typical investor curve:

http://www.financialjesus.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/inv...

> Lesson Learned #5: When you invest in something, you are NOT making money off of that product/company/currency existing. You are making money from the growth of that product/company/currency.

Let me introduce you to a concept called "dividends"...

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