Topic: Your biggest bitcoin-buy/sell fuckups - Therapy by writing & reading :) (Read 5848 times)

Right, to $1 

I bought and sold bitcoins at $5.00, But here is my big screw up.

I predicted bitcions would stabilize around $1.00. I was pretty sure they would when they rose to $30 and fell to $20. I speculated short term at $5.00 just to play, but I sold out expecting them to drop more and stabilize at $1.00.

The price of bitcoins went to $2.01, not quite in the $1.00 range I predicted. Trust me when you see the drop from $30.00 to $2.00, you really do expect them to stabilize around $1.00.

I wanted to enter into a large position at $1.00, oh well, they went higher and higher and I got pissed off that I missed my buy in point so I just stopped looking at the price of bitcoins all together.

I did want to invest in them again for the last years as a long term investment but just never got around to it.

One thing I always said is that you can expect bitcoin to always fall back down.

This x 1000, literally.

(i.e. sold about 10k btc for $5 a pop)

No Ferrari for me

Long story short I bought 50 coins @ $50.00. My iPhone bitcoin ticker alert went crazy after it hit $266, $190, $170, $130. This was a HUGE crash at the time. I sold at $70 making about $1000.00. I bought back 50 bitcoin at $96, then sold at the next top $166.00 before it crashed again. Bought back at $700 and watched it almost get cut in half and am still holding. If my bank didn't take 14 days to wire money to box I would have been in at $400.00, doesn't matter I'm holding now. If you read comments on all big financial sites who write an article on bitcoin 9/10 times the top comment will say how much of a bubble and a farse bitcoin is, I listened to this for awhile mainly cause I was scared to invest. I think the people who actually believe in it stopped defending it because its impossible (especially in the speculation thread) to defend the non stop bombardment of crash posts.

Lol, I had same experience at April and July's bottoms... though I'm not butthurt, that's my trading style and I've done good with it so far. I'm just not keen to hold my btc, they are usually always in action with alts.

Just after the silk road crash I set up this trade on Bitfinex: I borrowed 20K for 60 days at 34% apr. It cost $18/day to hold that money. I used it to by 140 coins at about $140. My plan was just to not touch it for the full 60 days. And it started to slowly go up. It hit almost $200 after two weeks and I was up almost 8K! But then it dropped down to 180, and I though "crap, I need to lock in these profits" and I sold the position, making 4 or 5 thousand. Well that's pretty cool, but if I had held the loan (which ironically would have ended today) I would have been up 117K.
So that sucks.

then the rest of the story is that the next week after I closed the position I sent those and other coins into coinlenders the day before it froze and collapsed and ended up loosing 85% of my total holdings.

and that really sucked.

When I decided to build my mining rig, I tried to be very clear on what the rig earned and what I had before building the rig.

I promised myself that I will replace the fiat I spent as soon as the rig reaches ROI.  

It did in May 2013, 40 BTC, and I sold it, and was content that I now had the mining rig and the bank balance was back at where it was before I got started.

In hindsight, I should have kept the money in that 40 BTC since it turned out the fiat would just sit there in the account.... earning 1% interest....

PS. I still have the rig and it has ROIed a few more times since May.

spent $1300 in coins in 2011 for a laptop... can probably have a Tesla by now.. Good thing i bought in around $100 this year so i havent completely missed the boat... Also bought a camera with 4 bitcions at around $120... that camera i've owned for 3 months could've been worth $4k

Put 0.17 BTC in COL for a pump and dump. Price was 0.00000029 ... waiting for it to rise ... a few days..... 0.00000006 

Discovered Bitcoin at 140. Finally managed registering when i was it was at 200. Then i thought it's already going down again and it's over, 'i'll wait for the next bubble'. Now bought some single digit coins for 500 and lately at 1000. Now i am kicking myself for not having 5x the coins (when i would have bought for 200). Argh

 
I have recently (last three paychecks - 6 weeks) stopped contributing to my 401k and instead using the allocation to buy bitcoins.  It's not much, I can only afford $100/paycheck, but I'm going touching those coins like my 401k unless I absolutely have to.  My wife said I could do it for a year and we'll reevaluate at the end of the year to see if I should go back to traditional 401k or still do bitcoins.

You are the true bitcoin user, supporter and contributor. Like the guy with 10,000 BTC pizza. Cheers!

Here's my story.  I buy tangible goods with btc.  I'm not a speculator, I'm not a hoarder.  I just get "things" that I can touch and feel.  I feel this way about money as well - money is only as good as the things you can do with it.
 
So....
 
I've gone through approx 300 btc in my history, and have less than 10 to my name now.  I got in when having a 5770 for mining was "decent", but took me a while to figure things out.   I sold some btc when they hit $30 (back in 2011) and bought a nice new gaming computer case and some new computer hardware.  Then mined more, and bought an AR-15 (piecemeal, not the whole unit) and some paintball gear.  Also bought some more hardware (gaming is my hobby, and mining btc is/was just an "aside" for the computer to do something while it's sitting idle).  Prior to mining what little bit I have, I would use my  machine for things like distributed.net, SETI@home, etc, etc.  So mining was just something cool to do to possibly make a little bit of money.
 
I also bought some gemstones with btc, and made a pendant/necklace for my wife to wear.   it's all 4 of our birthstones (hers, mine, kids).  I think I spent 30btc at the time for those gemstones.  I've traded for Amazon credit as well, and used that to buy some gun parts and ammo.  And finally, the latest and "best" purchase of all (which takes me below 10) was I recently bought a Mossberg 590a1 shotgun, and a Beretta NEOS, all bought from a user here on the forums with bitcoins.
 
So yeah, am I sad that I'm not currently sitting on 300btc ()?  A little. I could pay off my house.   But I'm satisfied for participating in the bitcoin economy, and have 3 cool guns that I didn't buy with "real money" (my wife's words), and some other odds and ends that I wouldn't have been able to purchase otherwise.
 
That's my story!

Words to live by.  When the rocket goes up I always bank at least twice my original investment before letting the rest ride.  That way you can't lose. 
This goes for all investments.

Thats why when you have good luck you should gradually lower your stakes. Doing the opposite will guarantee you to lose more than you won.

For instance when I make a good run and earn 1K by playing with 30 BTC, my next move will be with 15 BTC (aftermath of any move is lower volume anyway). I'll play with 30BTC again when the signs are crystal clear.

turned my 2 btc into 2.3 during the hearing and today i magically transformed them into 1.5

i stop that shit now and put everything back into my cold wallet

not really my biggest fuckup but my most recent one.

lost 0,5btc yesterday by sell high and buying lower cause I was caught off guard by my emotions and sold into the little panic at the beginning of the hearing... was holding for months before that and thought I had the Buy&Hold mentality integrated.

Today for the first time, I made profit seeing the beginning of a flashcrash - 0,55btc but instead of be happy about making up my loss of yesterday, i tried again and lost 1btc.

i guess that's life... greed is not good for me, only bad things happen to me when I take action rooted in greed.... YMMV...

Lol, just made my BTC back

You poor poor millionaire, I really feel for you ...  

Thank you for the therapeutic thread. It feels good to see I'm not the only one screwing up.

I want in half BTC / half LTC in april. I saw altcoins as a quick way to increase my BTC.
I got lucky playing around with feathercoin. I went full in LTC in summer but I panic sold everything during the SR dip.

Short story: if I just bought and hold, now I would have 3x the BTC I have now. 
 

Selling too much too early.

608?

You got to be kidding me.

Biggest mistake?
Preordering a BFL single instead of buying 130 BTC, nuff said.

I didn't sell half, I literally lost them.
Before the crash I had about 3200 and then after the crash I had 1600 due to my *masterful* trading strategy.


You're too kind, usually more of a lurker than a poster, but the sob story thread is definitely my time to shine 

 

You're quickly becoming my favorite poster on this board.

"Found"?

My worst decision was selling 200 bitcoins a few feeks ago when I found 300 bitcoins. Of course I have been buying them up and building up my bitcoin coffers again.

Bought 5 btc at $20 back in the day.  Sold a bit and here and there managed to both make money but less than I would have if I had just held.  Made a total of $400 profit for a total of $500 but sold at $260~ish and haven't rebought yet.  On the other hand, I grabbed $1k worth of coins at $400 from Coinbase.  Hope we don't crash before that clears on the 20th!

One man's pain is another man's envy. I would be ecstatic if I had 1600 coins!! Glad you only sold half of your incredible bounty 

Knew about bitcoin back when it was cpu mined.  

Researched it, read up on it, mined it with cpu for 3 days... lost interest.  I don't remember how much it was back then or even if there was exchanges or anything, it could not have been more than 1 or 2 bucks at the time a coin though.  Thought nothing of it and forgot to set my computer to auto-mine when it's not in use. Could have made a mint.

Fast forward a year or two. Interest in BTC was re-kindled when I read somewhere that it was going for $5 a coin. I remember being shocked it was $5.  I was thinking about doing some mining, but was doing the calculations and saw that for all the effort and power costs 'wasn't really worth it' enough to get me enthusiastic to mine with video cards. .....Yup, that was dumb. What was worse was I was working a p/t job reviewing computer hardware for a website and so had access to heavily discounted video cards, I paid about 1/3rd of retail and was getting the newest products on that market, often even before they were sold.

Ugh. Ya.

Got re-caught up in the bitcoin price boom of last year. I bought a few hundred dollars worth of coins at $14 and suddenly they went to $50 -$60, and climbing.

Spent 15 bTC towards a whopping 12 GH coming from Avalon in batch 3. Of course Avalon screwed that up, it was months late, and we'll only give me a 50% roi. You can buy 12 GH for like .6 BTC now or something.

Had a decent amount of Bitcoins and what did I do August? Invested a lot in Asicminer stock. I bought a lot at 3.5-3.8 BTC per share thinking it was undervalued...it slowly declined to around 0.6 BTC per share.

I made some good profit and my mining farm of 8 gpus at its peak brought in a lot of coins, but ended up losing much between Asicminer and Avalon.

So ya those are 5 terrible moves.  I could have made a bundle at least twice, maybe more times...but it's funny even with all those bad decisions I've still come out well ahead (hard not to when we are at $500+, which I still can't believe happened already) and have had a ton of nerd-fun, and now love Bitcoin even more.

Still have about that much left, it's nearly time for $1000 a night hookers and scarface like piles of blow...
Oh and also forgot about the 649btc that pirate stole... oh the stupidity 

[email protected] - Manipulator times (bitcoinica, pirateat40...)

Buying 1st gen ASIC chips from Avalon in a group buy. Ugh.

Have not sold a single coin.
Biggest fuckup was investing 6 BTC in coinlenders.

Ouch. Tell me you kept some...

I started buying and selling bitcoins around March 2012. I always kept a fluctuating stash of 100 - 300 coins that I bought for around $5 each on average. There was a mini spike to $14 followed by a flash crash to about $8 in August 2012. I was so proud of myself for selling 99% of my coins near the peak of that crash.  

At that point, my knowledge of bitcoin was limited, therefore my faith was weak. I thought it was overvalued, so I slowly bought back in over the course of the next year. I have less coins now, and I paid more for them!

Then I sold half my coins at about $120 at the beginning of the SR crash. Again, proud of myself for selling the top (Doh!). Accepted my mistake when we were pushing on $150 and bought back in. I like to think I just donated ~10% of my stash to people who may not have as many bitcoins. I'm ok with sharing.

I want to believe I've learned my lesson, but I'm sure I will continue to give away my coins during crashes. I have put ~35% of my coins on paper wallets that I don't touch no matter what though.

I like this thread. It's comforting  

If you learned your lesson, it was the best bargain of your life.

Lost 1600 coins during the april crash, I behaved like a pig and was slaughtered.
Ima go back to crying in between taking bites out of this cookie dough tube 

My worst fuckup was probably buying a KNC Jupiter miner for 88 BTC back in June. That little hobby of mine will cost me around 50 BTC according to my estimation, no way I can lose that much by the little day trading I do. Oh well I could have also sold them all and never bought back, so I guess it could be worse...

Didnt bought 500btc back in january because i was too stupid to figure out how to put money in my mtgox account... gave up and forgot about btc till april news...  never bothered to buy and hold since then cu even 100 $ seemed high for me...

Bought 100 BTC @ $20 back in June 2011 on the way up. Price hit $30 and then dropped to $8 at the end of August 2011 when I finally sold.

Was planning to sell a little bit just after the previous ATH ( 266 ) because i expected a bit of a retracement back to 250 to buy back in. Well that did happen. Only thing was.. i fell asleep behind my pc.......

Learn to distinguish the difference between errors of knowledge and breaches of morality. An error of knowledge is not a moral flaw, provided you are willing to correct it; only a mystic would judge human beings by the standard of an impossible, automatic omniscience. But a breach of morality is the conscious choice of an action you know to be evil, or a willful evasion of knowledge, a suspension of sight and of thought. That which you do not know, is not a moral charge against you; but that which you refuse to know, is an account of infamy growing in your soul. Make every allowance for errors of knowledge; do not forgive or accept any break of morality.

spend this now.

there is seriously very little time left....

I heard about BTC around June 2012. Bought my first BTC in December, then more in Jan and Feb. Average price around $30.

I was panick selling my 200 BTC stash on bitcoin24 at around $60, yep the bottom. I immediately regret it and tried to buy it back next day, but bitcoin24 went offline and my money is gone.

I was thinking of buying 1 BTC, but my emotional pain is still here, I just cannot put anymore money into this. I think I'll never own BTC again, well maybe if they drop below 200, but I think I missed that train.

I bought 7 BTC for £50. I then lost all of that on btcjam.

Just recently sold 3 BTC when we were at ~£80 each. The good thing was I withdrew it from coinlenders and sold. Bad thing is we are now at £300. Still at least I got out before inputs/coinlenders got hacked.

Now I just buy a small amount each day and won't sell unless I absolutely need to. I plan on holding for at least a year until I need to pay off my car.

Sold 40 on Friday thinking it'll drop, as if often does, over the weekend.

Within hours a new ATH was reached, then proceeded to continue on up.




Still, have $16000. Not TOO shabby!

sold 500 BTC at $70

Read about BTC in 2011, thought it was exciting and wanted to get some, but jumping through all the hoops seemed like an enormous effort for something that would probably never come of the ground. It's expensive to be lazy.

Then I bought a small stash during the april-crash at about 80 $ btc. Sat on my coins until the SR incident where I sold 10 coins at around 107 expecting it to tank and giving me the opportunity to buy loads of sweet coins. The day after it was 120 $ and rising. Fuck.

Now I have bought my self a fair amount of alt's for playing around. The BTC's will stay in a paper wallet until the price is at least 100 k.

Sold 2000BTC in 2012 when it jumped to $8/btc. I doubled my fiat and was waiting for drop, but then I had to buy it back at about $15/btc so I only recovered a half of sold amount. Thus, I lost almost 1000BTC in my portfolio.
Since then I've given up speculating (except minor amounts just for fun).

I'm waiting for someone like Smoothie to come along. Saying: "Lol. I never sold. lol. I have 1,000,000 coins still. lol  "

Back in 2012, traded 70 Bitcoins for around $15 (they were $10 at the time) thinking it was a smart move. Mining rig fucks up (couldn't be bother diagnosing it) and I can't generate anymore, leaving me stranded with 40 Bitcoins till this day. I wish I never traded those 70 coins and that my rig paying me 1.5 BTC a day didn't stop.

got told about BTC rising again in January by a friend

ignored it and said "once a bubble always a bubble"

he invested (but got screwed by bitcoin24)

Here's mine. I bought about 250 BTC in the $5 to $7.50 range. Sol it at various clips on the way up. I guess my average selling price was about 80$? But I could have easily gone all in and bought 10,000's of thousands of BTC at the beginning. Well hindsight is good and all, but I think I would have still sold it all at $80 anyway. Bitcoin is one of those things you just got to buy and get away from all the noise for a few years.

I earned 40 bitcoins in April crash, then I lost 20 on first rebound and then 20 on another. I learned a lesson to never trade again. I much more prefer to have my amount of coins I have now than gamble it and have less.

I think I have the worst so far.

I knew about bitcoin when they were still like $8, didn't think much of it. Come back from a long holiday. They're $30. Oh I'll buy like 15 then.
They hit $100. Oh I'm gonna put in $20000, and buy 200. It gets to like $250, and I'm like yeah I'm going to sell half tomorrow. Boooom burn baby, craassssshhh.
After it rebounds and starts falling again. I sell $6000 worth on Bitfloor. The rest I keep in coins.

It keeps on going down more, so I end up selling all at like $110 on gox. Rebuy later at like $130. Starts going down again, sell at $100. Promise myself I'll buy them when it get's to under $80. I'm on holiday, about to go all in at like $78. Bus is waiting for me to take me to a train station, to get on a 24hr train. I have to leave now, they won't wait, I think no way it's gonna go back up that fast, I'll buy when I get the internet. It's at $100, oh shit. I'll wait for another crash.

It's at like $160, everyone is saying buy now, train is about to leave. I put in bid at like $15x. Go to bed, see I missed it by like 50 cents. And it's already way higher.

And since then I've refused to buy, waiting for a crash. I'm sitting at a loss at Gox, and still can't get my Bitfloor funds.

So please baby please crashhhhh.

sold 50 right before this rally - oh well

i made my initial investment back and I have enough "free" bitcoins for now

not selling anymore, just buying and holding for now on!

Bought 1.9 bitcoins. I decided to try one of those trading bots at BTCe. After the weekend I now have 1.7 bitcoins thanks to that bot . Not such a big loss today but could be pretty big in the future. I got rid of the bot of course and just holding for now.

Never sell your Bitcoins. What's the point of going back to FIAT when you know it's going down to zero ?

Just keep the minimum in FIAT to live and wait for the US economy crash.

Bought 50 BTC at 10 EUR, sold at 20 EUR and then bought back at 100$ with less BTC

I paid 1800 BTC for a Butterfly Labs mini rig pre-order back in January!  

sold 10 in 2012 for $5 a pop

Deposited £2000 in Intersango end of 2011 and was a mouse click away of buying 1000 coins, but didn't 

My recent fuckup - forgetting about a limit sell order.

buy more,

next year we might no longer see 3 digits

I bought at the bottom of the second april crash at $50, and sold at $58, thinking I was enjoying a 16% profit.

In June I was convinced it was 2011 all over again. I bought at 82 and sold at 75, bought at 67 and sold at 69.

During the silkroad crash I thought 110 (on bitstamp) was the top of the dead cat bounce, and sold. I had to rebuy at 120 before the rally.

I didn't participate at all in the april bubble, the 50-170 rally, the 80 to 130 rally, or the 66 to 150 rally.

bought as much BTC as i could between sept 2012-april 2013. 

tripled my BTC holdings by buying LTC during March 2013.

then dumped at less than 100 during july 2013. 

not too sad because i just bought back in a month later but still...

Biggest trading faux pas so far?

Trying to get $10k into Virtex in October instead of going straight to Localbitcoins.

What a mistake. It will probably be until January before my funds clear. If I'd paid a little more through Localbitcoins, I would have more than doubled my money already.

By the time I came to my senses and paid anonymous cash to some Localbitcoins dude, it was over $400.

Live and learn.

sold all 3 of my coins at 205, then bought in again at 350 and sold at 360

sold 5 BTC around 16th Okt after price not moved for a long time

Feel really stupid for selling at 420 and rebuying with a lost today but I think the rebuying part was not that bad, China is going up, and so will all the other exchanges! TO THE MOON 

Just not sinking more as fast as possible back when it was in 2 digits.  First buy was around $48.  But we didn't like CVS/MoneyGram/ZipZap/Mt.Gox because our money got lost in between and we had to call people.

Loved Bitfloor, but by the time we got signed up, the price was already $90 and the rocket was lit up to $266.  It crashed and we were actually upside down for quite a while since our average was $120.  (Bitchick didn't love that.)

Probably the biggest screw-up was letting my buddy go in line in front of me at BofA when he was setting up his Bitfloor account.  This was the day that it was $266.  By the time we got back to the office from lunch (and Bitfloor recovered enough to do anything), the price was in the 60s.  He was like, "Should I place an order here or there?"  I'm like, "Dude, buy market now!"  He got in at $70.  So lucky.

By the time my money cleared (only 15 minutes total, Bitfloor was the best) I got over $90.  Still, I'm happy for him.

Special thanks to Roman from Bitfloor for getting us our money back after his bank screwed him.  (Since we were depositing into Bank of America, I assume it was them.  Not hard to believe since they screw everyone constantly and steal people's houses with fake mortgages.)

I know the feeling thinking your in late. I haven't had any fuckups in hindsight.

I discovered bitcoin through a friend at work. He knew about bitcoin at the $2 time. I discovered is at the >$90 time.

When I heard about bitcoin and mining it took me a while to figure it out.
At one point in time I went for it and bought 2 GPUs and started mining. I knew I was late and ASICs were in preorder.
Most people told me I would never see a profit on bitcoin. I went in on a gut feeling.
When I was on vacation 2 days in my miners stopped due to stability issues. This cost me a bitcoin at that time
After mining for a while I only got out 2 bitcoin before it cost me more power than the bitcoins were worth.
Only just got out my GPUs so went back to gaming thinking bitcoin wasn't for me.
I stopped mining.... (a big fuckup)

A few weeks ago I looked at the price of bitcoins and realized that I never should have stopped mining, bitcoins increase value making old mining losses into big profits over time.

Luckily I went into bitcoin with a piece of my savings and bought a few coins thinking, i'm going down with this investment....
Now i've realized that my BTC have a great profit. I made more money per day on bitcoin on some days than going to work .

What I can say to anyone on bitcoin are two things
- your always too late with bitcoin the price will always suck when you buy
- your never too late with bitcoin the price will always get better (if you hold on crashes)

Timing isn't an issue. If you want to invest, invest and wait for a few days weeks. If your profits don't pick up then you can probably get out with a minor loss.

Currently i'm back into mining altcoins for BTC. It costs more power than BTC mined but I know it will become a great reward in 3 years time.
I'm looking at staying in bitcoin for at least 3 years and hoping for the $100000 per bitcoin days

The irony for the dude who told me about bitcoin is that he has 0.19 BTC where I have way more, that's his fuckup

Worked for my bitcoin, got 14; sold most of them around 150$

Few months later, this shit.

Bought 5 bitcoins at 200ea for 1000$.. Told myself I would buy and hold cause that seems to be the best with bitcoins plus I dont know much about trading.. But I'm a gambler at heart and wanted to increase my stash a little bit so I sold at 420$ea and placed a buy order at 375$ea on cavirtex and waited for the weekend crash.. Friday night people started to panic sold i thought nice it will work out.. But it only went at 395$ or so. I panic rebought today at 474$ea because I dont think it will go down anymore on the charts I see there is alot of bids and fiat left especially on btcchina and they affect the bitcoin price the more.. Plus I think monday could be a good day with the US meeting. So I lost 0.7bitcoin in 1 day lol I suck at trading now I swear I will HOLDDD

Hindsight isn't as bad as weak hands.

You only fuckup if you sell cheaper. Don't blame yourself for being critical and not risk money. EVER.

Yes, i am a crybaby .
I discovered bitcoin at about 14th of October at 140. I was thinking this is a great thing till it's obviously steadily rising. Then it took some tries to get documents to register on bitstamp – when I finally registered it was already at 190 and I didn’t buy thinking too late. Then it fell down after 200 and I thought it's collapsing already and was afraid again. At 255 i bought super-tinysmall. And at 296 super-tinysmall and at 314 super-tinysmall. But just a few days earlier i would have been confident investing 30x more and would be 'in' on the ride. Actually that doesn't sound so bad.. on the other hand i could have doubled the savings of last 5 years in 1 month. Haha. I see keeping my emotions in check will be a challenge (and perhaps bring me into the poorhouse).

Probably many people with better stories.