Once again, my heart goes out to all those who lost coins at Finex
Your have a kinder heart than I.
My heart goes out to all those Bitcoiners who, after countless exchange failures and hacks, understood the risks of holding large IOUs with third parties, yet still had to watch their asset drop in value as the market priced in (is pricing in) those events. (Of course some will argue this was going to happen to the market anyway.)
The unfortunate thing about society is that everyone has to take the bad along with the good, and when stupid people get together and fuck shit up, everyone pays the price. Perhaps I'm cold hearted, or even a pessimist, but I don't understand this forgiveness when everyone has to bear the burden of the irresponsible.
To be clear, while shitty things do happen quite a lot in bitcoinlandia, I'm speaking more generally here, and these types of "everyone pays" events happen all the time in the grand scheme of things.
As much as I wanted to say "I told you so" after repeatedly posting about the stupidity of keeping coins or even fiat on hackable internet exchanges and the even more mind-numbingly foolish practice of margin trading in something as easily manipulable as Bitcoin, I figured the fools who lost coins had suffered enough.
Some of these idiots made snide comments about my paying a premium to buy my coins from "vending machines", as if buying fiat from their precious bank ATMs was any different.
I tried to explain that the reasonably small extra fee over the cost of fiat transfers and exchange commissions was a small price to pay for the convenience, speed, anonymity, and most importantly security of buying from local BTC ATMs. I learned a 50
BTC lesson from MtGox. No more internet exposure for any of my bitcoins ever again. My private keys are
private.
The coins I bought yesterday from a fully anonymous ATM went into a paper wallet I generated on a computer and printer that had never been connected to the internet and were incapable of being connected or hacked (no wifi, bluetooth nor NIC cable).
Call me paranoid if you want but at my age I prefer to call it being prudent. Seems in this case I was right.
Damn now you've made me sound like I'm smugly saying "I told you so" even though I didn't want to.
_______
As for all of us bearing the cost of other people's stupidity, I figure it's just temporary and as my morning post pointed out, we're already back to where we might have been considering the previous couple of days' price decline.
I didn't see it as a loss in the fiat price of my coins, I saw it as a buying opportunity. What's that old saw about making lemonade out of life's lemons?
Jimbo:
You seem like a fairly reasonable guy, and for that matter, you likely are going to concede that the whole bitcoin ecosystem is a diverse place, and in order for it to have value, there needs to be diverse activities, including the including of third party risk which comes through exchanges.
Sure, there may be some better ways and better systems to accomplish the same thing, yet at the same time, the whole BTC infrastructure is developing and evolving and in that regard, a lot of this exchange activity is inevitable...
Now I agree with you on a personal level there are ways to preserve and secure value, but if everyone did the same as you, including institutions, who the hell knows where bitcoin's price would be or if bitcoin would be as developed as it is.
In any event, as an individual acting in the ecosystem, each of us can choose an approach balancing risk and reward that hopefully fits with his/her personal situation.
