Topic: A tale of gambling and greed. (Read 1218 times)

For me I lost a lot too not in exchanges but because of gambling in my early days. I took a lot of gamble investing in altcoins that never had any value at all and other investment sites that didn't last long. The only one site I profit well is hashocean but it is closed now and therefore I learned the lesson to never ever trust just any altcoin and any investment sites that comes along, and with this lesson getting out of an investment site after earning even a little is my first priority today.

I lost 99% of my bitcoin (at the time) when bitcoinica was hacked. It was I think the first exchange to allow lending and margin trading. I wasn't interested in margin trading but decided to put my whole stack for lending, less than a week later the exchange was history and my stack gone. I guess it was greed got me too, thinking of the interest and ignoring the risks.

The lesson I took from that was never trust the exchange.

I also lost out on cryptsy and mintpal but luckily only small amounts because of above lesson.

The MtGox thing was hard to predict, mainly because it had been the longest running bitcoin exchange. People had seen other exchanges come and go and thought that because Gox was still standing, it was safe.

Exchange risk is THE biggest risk in bitcoin space. I can see why the SEC rejected the bitcoin ETF, citing that most of the trading volume was done on unregulated exchanges. I guess their fear is another Gox tanking the price - prices arn't meant to move because the exchange is corrupt, but because of fundamental values and the economy.

I had a stack of coins in Gox. But Gox where starting to have issues, and already when the Coinlab lawsuit were issued, I though of getting everything the hell out of there.

I didn't and more red flags were raised, until I recently learned about all the stuck btc-transfers, and I finally moved everything to a cold wallet. Luckily the transfer got through ( I had stuck transfers before, which Mark manually fixed for me by asking him on irc).

so when btc withdrawals were shut down, I had everything in cold storage. All good.

Then I learned about the arbitrage opportunity,btc-e->okpay->mtgox->bitcoinbuilder... So I gambled half my stack on that. and today I finally got a payout from that earning a nice little profit, at quite the high risk I must admit. Being a little bit slower,  I might've been affected by the Gox closure...

But the prices at bitcoinbuilder was tempting. Seeing as Roger Ver wanted to buy 100 btc minimum gox coins, and seeing that several other traders i know still believed in gox, I wanted to give it a shot, and I went in for gox coins at 0.5 with half my stack of real btc.

Then I even traded it a bit to increase it even more, and anticipated the reopening of MtGox and the increase in value of MtGox coins.

As we all know, this never happened.

Today I was finally paid out from bitcoinbuilder, making that a nice 50% arbitrage win, meaning that I'm left with 75% of my original stack.

In retrospect it was silly to buy gox coins with half the stalk after I had transferred the first half out of MtGox to bitcoinbuilder, if I didn't, I would be left with a 125% stack, but seeing as how many people have lost a lot here, I'm quite lucky.

I did fear that the bitcoinbuilder deal would not go through, as goxcoins were sold there at saturday, and just sent to me a few hours ago.

So all in all, I was lucky to get out of this almost in one piece.

It's always important to asses your risks, and if in doubt, not acting is often the smartest thing to do. I never had all my coins in MtGox at once while I was doing this, and also I did not do enough research on bitcoinbuilder.com, as I usually do, but luckily they came through with everything.

My deepest sympathy for everyone that has lost coins due to the gox fiasco.