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* death_wish strokes Bitcoin’s hair gently, gently, whilst speaking in soothing tones.
Don’t worry, Bitcoin. We still love you. We will always love you. Please don’t be so sad.
I want my bitcoins back. To have and to hold. Forever.Can you just stfu now? Spammed the whole thread with your stupid posts about you getting fucked for using leverages and not going the safe route with just holding BTC when you don't know shit about Trading? I am done with you and your shit.
So irritating.
No this is good! It's much better for people to learn from the misfortune of others than to experience it themselves. If newbies see the pain and anguish we're going through as a result of death_wish's margin trading debacle, it might prevent us from having to live through it again. We'll all come out of this for the better.
My thoughts exactly! I've been thinking for the last several years what is in the mind of leverage/margin traders. We know that they can't win this game, but they don't. So probably they are quite nervous, easily irritated, harboring suicidal thoughts which exacerbate each bull run, seeing how much they would have got by just hodling instead of trading. And here it is - a perfect example for that. Even his nickname shows the devastating effect of the leverage trading on the human mind. So, let him rant and spam, this is a good lesson to the newbies.
Thank you both. I know WO. I sometimes see you mad hatters posting memes about people getting wrecked on margin, trying to warn the clueless newbies. So true! Why did I suddenly pop up in WO with this name, with my first post being a graphic depiction of some of my losses? Among other reasons that I consciously intended: I know that when the green candlesticks start, y’all will use my pathetic, personally embarrassing public display of wreckage and grieving to hammer some sense into n00bs with moons in their eyes.
I took this name,
death_wish, because I don’t need to wait for the bull run. I know damn well that I have lost a fortune! In a near-total wipeout after repeated liquidations, I have now lost BTC that I reasonably expect to be worth $millions in the future. I didn’t have a
large amount; but I had enough that if I had simply held it, then
with no further effort or investment whatsoever, I probably would have achieved what Jay calls “fuck you status” sometime after the 2028 Halving—maybe by 2029–2030. That’s a conservative price prediction—not a “WEN MOON [rocket emoji]” nonsense hope.
Time flies. 2028 is only as far away now as 2022 was in 2016, when BTC was as low as $300. I suffered a personal wipeout in 2016 (
nothing about markets or trading!), and started the year 2017 flat broke—absolutely flat broke—much worse than now, since I have now retained some emergency backup reserves to avoid facing that situation
again. If I could go back in time to 2016 and “somehow” make sure that I had BTC saved away for 2022, then I would now already have “fuck you status” by Jay’s standards!
I know what’s coming. When I am not at risk of liquidation, I am never worried about BTC being down. Now, I am
terrified about it going up, leaving me behind.
And it is all so senseless!
DO YOU WANT TO SEE WHAT PAIN LOOKS LIKE!? YOU DO NOT KNOW WHAT PAIN IS. Here is some of the hard product of prudence, that I ruined with foolishness:
In January, at the same time as I started getting myself in trouble, I bought 1.0 BTC outright for cash. It had been a dream of mine, something I intended for a long time: I slaughtered the fatted calf. I sold a huge chunk of my most profitable altcoin investment—a position that I had attained by patience and intelligence, not “WEN MOON”. With the dollar proceeds of sale
(why the hell do newer altcoins not have a trading pair with BTC!?), I immediately purchased exactly One Bitcoin in a single market-order
BUY 1 BTC. I did not even look at the price, beyond basically making sure that I had approximately sufficient dollars. I ticked the “margin” box just in case—whoops, borrowed something like $180—hahah, I could have just paid it off, and withdrawn my shiny new bitcoin to its new home in my wallet where it belonged.
BTC was nominally around $43.5k at the time; I think my order cut through the book to somewhere over $44k, or whatever; who cares, LOL. Seriously, to have the experience was worth ignoring a little % price impact. And I must emphasize,
I timed this based on the ratio of my altcoin to BTC, not on dollar pricing. No, I should not have waited for BTC to dip—not unless I wanted to risk holding yucky dollar shitcoins instead of Bitcoin—not unless I wanted to gamble that the dollar would moon against Bitcoin. (That is what has later happened; but I would not have gambled on it in January.) I cashed out when my alt was around 0.0048 BTC—now, it is just over 0.0020 BTC. “Cashing out” means money, i.e. BTC. I account PnL in BTC. Not central bank $hitcoins.
[2022-01-12]I saved this screenshot
As a trophy — now it shall
Haunt me forever.
#haiku
I felt like a king, doing that! It was the moment that I had been envisioning for almost two years of patiently waiting to take profit.
It was pure profit, because I had already long ago recovered 100% of my BTC principal from that investment.
1.0 BTC pure profit. One new whole bitcoin to HODL forever. I lived the dream.
Now, it is all gone—that shiny new whole bitcoin is gone, together with almost everything else. Almost all my BTC lost. Most alts long gone. All profits erased—above-depicted profits, and also all other profits. Prior BTC principal evaporated. The dream is shattered, replaced with a nightmare.
WHY DID I DO IT!? So many times, I have asked myself... If I had just KEPT MY POSITION WITH ALL ASSETS AND NO DEBT, then I would now be laughing and frolicking in the sunshine as the market burns down. I DGAF. When my BTC is safe and sound, I DGAF.
It is why I felt compelled to create this forum account, at a time when
I had only just sold a total of 0.5 BTC to avoid liquidation of the rest:Now, I want to kill myself... or at least, take up alcoholism as a hobby.
(Someone, please quote me.)
That was a loss of 0.5 BTC. I mentally account 0.5 BTC as “future >= $500k”. That is conservative. By Saylor’s expectations, it is a future few $million that I threw away for nothing.
I only started selling BTC when my back was against the wall. In the months before that, I dissipated my other
previously not-insignificant assets to avoid selling any BTC in this money-eating sinkhole of a margin account. A few days before I started selling BTC, I had poured into that account
another $4,200 by selling off most of the already-gutted remains of my best-performing altcoin position, plus
another few $thousand from my stablecoin reserves, plus piles of scraps from dumping every little shitcoin I had collected (airdrops, freebie rewards, etc.), plus... I did not yet even account for it; I was just frantically grabbing, dumping, and throwing in dollars as BTC dropped. I guesstimate that I wasted at least
another $10k in total, in my last-ditch effort to shore up my position as BTC plummeted down to $30k.
Then, nominally around $29,500,
I sold 0.5 BTC (with my orders cutting through the book as low as about $28,500 IIRC—need to look back). At least, I very much still had non-shrimp status. I still had probably enough for Jay to proclaim my “fuck you status” by the end of the decade.
Two days later, I was
liquidated so that I had only about 0.5 BTC left.Now, after more futile sales to avoid liquidation and two more liquidations, I have been
crushed down to less than 0.05 BTC. Which is still at risk, if the bottom is not in. This is ridiculous!
Well, now I only need to come up with about $877 to free my remaining itty-bitty bitcoin dust. Whoopee. I may dip into the emergency reserve, which I promised myself I would not touch for this. Thinking it over now. I am in a state of shock, not good for making financial decisions (with inaction also being a decision). [Edit before posting: I wrote this earlier, then realized I should take care of some business... Slightly different situation now.]
I knew all of this all along. It is why after I got myself trapped, I spent
months struggling to save my BTC. This has been ongoing since January. Since mid-February, I have more or less just been trying to survive without selling any BTC, while trying to minimize losses to my alts. By sacrificing most of my alts piece by piece, slowly bleeding out my assets, throwing good money after bad, I managed to avoid losing any BTC until May.
This margin account took over my life. Ironically, if I had given up on my BTC months ago and not wasted time trying to save it, I could have saved more of it by dumping/covering at a much higher price,
and spent my time making dollars to buy more BTC right now. But
I devoted my life to salvaging my BTC. For months. Manually juggling a contorted mess of accounts, that perpetually got messier and lossier. Watching the distressed Bitcoin account day and night, in February and March. I only had a brief reprieve in April, at which time I ignored the market, and started working on a moneymaking code project—the thing that was supposed to save my BTC from a mountain of piled-up unrecoverable debt, which I could not otherwise repay without selling BTC. It takes time to develop. Too late!
Of many mistakes, my
worst mistake was adding BTC collateral to avoid losing BTC. Until I was all-in. If I had cut my losses early, then my BTC loss would have been painful (any loss of BTC is painful!), but not catastrophic. This goddamn margin account ate my BTC piece by piece, ate my other assets piece by piece...
death by a thousand cuts... insert curse words here.
I HAVE BEEN LIVING IN HELL FOR THE PAST FIVE MONTHS, IN TORTURE DAY AND NIGHT, BECAUSE OF A FEW LITTLE MISTAKES THAT GOT ME TRAPPED. I FOUGHT TO SAVE MY BTC. IT BECAME THE SINGULAR PURPOSE OF MY LIFE, FOR MONTHS. AND AFTER ALL THAT I FOUGHT TO SAVE IT... I LOST IT ALL ANYWAY.And if
I, of all people, got wrecked this way, then newbies are affirmatively foredoomed in the moment that they touch margin.
* death_wish is a macho-man and a usually rational grown-up adult, now weeping over lost bitcoins and semi-coherently rambling to strangers on the Internet. (NEWBIES, PAY ATTENTION.)