Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Ask HN: Anyone lost a lot of money with NFTs/Cryptos? What's your story?
24 points by agent008t 7 months ago | hide | past | favorite | 37 comments
I remember 2 years ago there were a lot of posts/comments from people having significant chunks of their net worth (e.g. 3M$ out of 4M$) in NFTs or cryptos.

Were you one of them? Would be interesting to hear your story. Was it a wild ride for you? How did you manage? What are you doing now?




Solo mined 100BTC on CPU back in 2009 or 2010. It wasn’t even worth a dollar. I formatted the drive that had them on it (I had forgotten about them) and probably threw it away a good few years before it even spiked the first time to like $4.

I don’t waste much time thinking about it, I know I would have sold at $4, or $8, or $1000 and then just been kicking myself as it hit new highs. Better to have just lost it completely and have the story to tell.


I played around with bitcoin early on and tried mining just for fun. Had 52 bitcoins.

Then the price hike in 2013 came and I was reminded of bitcoin again. Sadly the wallet was stored on a harddrive that was wiped sometime in 2011. 52 bitcoins had basically no value when I got them, but that clearly changed.


Yeah sure, I've had my pain days. :) I'm still up overall, fwiw.

I lost 15 ETH writing a faulty script to trade automatically on EtherDelta, when that was still a thing. Their UI was (intentionally?) poor and didn't have client-side checks to ensure people weren't fat fingering their trades. It also didn't have an automatic market maker. So, if someone typo'ed an order, the typo'd order would sit on the books as there wasn't a process to automatically match overlapping bid/asks. As a user, this meant you would sometimes see free money literally sitting there waiting to be clicked and taken.

So I thought I'd automate the process and trade for the typo automatically. This didn't work out so well. First, it turns out there were other bots running already. Since it was all on-chain, the gas price you bid determines your transactions in-block priority. So, all the bots were trapped in a game theory dilemma. If there was a $10,000 typo, and all you need to do is submit "Yes", then how much should you pay to try and beat others to saying yes? Well, if you're the only participant, then you pay $0. If you're one of 2 participants then you pay $5,000. If you're one of 3 then $3,333.33, etc. The issue? You don't know how many other bots are out there.

This situation has weird outcomes. There was actually free $10k+ trades sitting there to be taken. They were actually being taken, but those taking were never the ones profiting. Instead, it was the ETH miners receiving huge priority tips that were making out like bandits... but if all the unprofitable bots ever gave up then, suddenly, there would be free money once again.

Anyway. The EtherDelta service was comprised of two wallets. One was within their smart contract and one was external. You place bids with money that you moved inside their smart contract, but you pay your bid's gas with money you kept outside their smart contract. I ran my code for a while, thought it seemed OK enough to run overnight, and, just before bed, decided that "to be safe" I would move most of my money from in-contract to out-of-contract. This would make it so that I didn't wake up to a ton of lost money because my bot wouldn't have a ton of money to trade with.

Unfortunately, there was an edge case in my code that would cause the bot to try and place a bid and fail in a way that burned gas. That edge case came up while I was sleeping and my bot burned through all my gas. This wouldn't have been an issue if I had left my money where it was originally, but, because I moved it all to the wallet which was used to pay for gas, I ended up burning a bunch of ETH in gas overnight.


I'm sorry I have nothing smarter to say than OOF.


I've been trying to go 100% crypto since 2012. Been putting pretty much every penny I can into it since then. Of course Theres been ups and downs.

One time I got hacked by downloading a RAT off a torrent for a virtual machine and lost 10,000 ETH, now worth like $20,000,000.00 so that was annoying.

Then of course just the price swings, I'm down nearly $2million since the high point, so is that "lost"?

Never was stupid enough to buy an NFT, even though I TRIED to convince myself. That was just such a stupid time to be in crypto and I'm glad those people lost all that money. Morons.

Now I'm 100% XMR and BCH, they are the ONLY cruptoCURRENCIES that work and are needed, literally everything else in the space is a scam to take your money.


I bought bitcoin for a few dollars. When it was around $1500 and I was a broke college student I sold.

I'm not even upset, I have negative feelings towards crypto in general and that was a part of reason for selling. Everyone I know who is into crypto was always excited NOT to pay taxes. Plus, there is just so much scams and fraud in the space. I'm all in index funds now.

I do know a guy who became a millionaire because of BTC.


I've been into Bitcoin since 2012 also, so people sometimes think I'm rich hahaha. I don't think my net worth ever surpassed $200k.


I'll NEVER understand people. If you knew about BTC why not buy and hold it?

Around 2012-13 a lot of us would talk fervently about how BTC would take over. We all wanted to have at least 21 BTC to be "in the club". I like to think we all kept our promise to each other and are still in the club :)


It's not that simple...

How do you know how long to hold?

I bought a bunch of bitcoin for under $100 each and sold them for ~$1000 each at one point.

Should I have held them longer? Sure, but how could anyone really know that? How do you resist the urge to realize the >10x gain in a short term?

After it went up to ~1200 it crashed down to 200-300 for years before it recovered and skyrocketed to new heights.

If you had bought bitcoin for something low like say $100, are you telling me you would really have resisted selling it when it hit $1000? or $2000? How about when it hit $10,000 or $25,000 or even $50,000? Knowing that it could come crashing down at any second as well.

The peak was nearly 70K, and now it's only about half that.

So simply holding isn't a complete strategy.


1. Until USD inevitably collapses under the weight of its own indebtedness and fraud.

2. Yes, you made a mistake. Use the "Rake Method" many of us have preached for a decade. No guessing needed, profit taking can even be automated. It's all very simple.

3. Yes, a great buying opportunity.

4. Yes, I bought a lot around $150's. Using the rake method you can't go wrong. If it's more cash than I need I buy gold. Easy. Angin, the research is already done, and we have a solution to your issues, the rake method.


>No guessing needed, profit taking can even be automated. It's all very simple.

I assume you have a net worth > $100M right? as it's so easy.


I didn't know about the "Rake Method". It seems a reasonable strategy.

I implemented it in Go code: https://gist.github.com/alfonmga/50864730c3ebce7491542d146ed....

Cheers, mate.


I knew about bitcoin before 2012. I had a friend try to convince me to mine some with my beefy desktop, since “its the future”. I thought it sounded like a dumb ponzi scheme. It might still be a dumb ponzi scheme but i fucked up bad on thay one.


Ha, yeah I remember in high school looking into Bitcoin, thought it was cool.

Then I realized it would never be useful as a currency due to the Bitcoin cap making it deflationary.

I still don't disagree, and most of Bitcoin is speculation and fraud, but the correlation of Bitcoin being deflationary is that the value will only go up.

So, Doink.


You can still buy Bitcoin today!


Big difference between mining coins that in hindsight reached whst $20k in value each and buying the coins lol


Well, life happens and you can't know the future. I was poor as fuck in 2012. I had just moved back to the US after spending all my money on a couchsurfing adventure in another country. I was living in a house with my girlfriend who didn't tell me I wasn't supposed to live there until I had actually flew to Tacoma, a city halfway across the country from everyone I knew. I got a job working at a gas station and I imported nootropics from China to sell on a couple of message boards. This guy offered to buy $100 of noopept with Bitcoin so I accepted. I had heard of Bitcoin from Silk Road and thought it was a really cool concept. I lost some bitcoins in an exchange hack/inside job? Bitfloor. Traded on BTC-E and actually came out ahead on that. Didn't sell in the 2013 bullrun. Got bored of crypto and sold almost all of it in 2016, just before the next bullrun. Got into stocks and lost money there. Played around with some defi stuff in 2020. Cashed out some profits on that next bullrun. Lost $20k on Anchor. I think I still have like $50k left of crypto. Need to check into that. Got .65btc, 11 eth, 1000 atom, 3000 polygon, and small amounts of other random stuff. It's funny how I'm not even a whole coiner anymore. I think when I got into crypto BTC was almost $10


I heard about it 2009/2010 and didn't buy it then because it just seemed like some scammy way to make money. When I learned more about its use and effects as a currency, I became interested and bought some, but its use as a legitimate currency just won't happen. In practice, it's just a scammy way to make money, always has been. The most useful thing about crypto was that you could convert it to USD for a profit, but the days of ez money have passed.


Interesting experience but I use Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash actually, every day almost.

Not sure why in 2023 people keep saying it "doesn't work". Why say that? BCH just works and always has since 2009.


What part of the world do you live in? Just curious, I travel very often but have yet to see any convenient way to spend bitcoin everyday.


> BCH just works and always has since 2009.

BCH didn’t exist in 2009


BCH was BTC in 2009, iirc


No, BTC was BTC in 2009, and BCH was created as a fork of BTC years later.


I've known about it since 2009 or 2010, I'm not quite sure anymore. When it was still fractions of a cent per.

My read on it at the time was that it was an ideological project from a pseudo-right tech libertarian sphere that I have always despised. At that point you could not yet use it to buy illegal porn and drugs on the internet, but the people who were into bitcoin were SO EXCITED that you soon would be able to.

I figured it would never be useful. I was right about all of that, I think? I didn't predict that people would get rich from it despite these things though. I like to think it wouldn't have changed anything for me.


We knew about casinos even longer. It doesn't compel us to go all-in on zero. And from the technical point of view bitcoin was maybe an interesting idea for the few early ears, and then it was clear that it failed for any legitimate use. It was true 10 years ago and still true today.


Plenty of legitimate uses exist today. It didn't go mainstream and replace your debit/visa card.


Nope. The only actually working use case for bitcoins (and all other tokens too) is law avoidance. For that, sure, it is great. Transferring sums across borders without complying with AML laws and without declaring them (so law avoidance), receiving salary in tokens and not paying taxes (law avoidance), paying bribes (law avoidance), buying forbidden shit (law avoidance) and the list goes on. None of those are legit use cases. And for legit ones bitcoin is simply not competitive due to atrocious performance and user experience. PS: before you say Lightning - that is not a bitcoin, but a new centralized system which completely reneges on the decentralization promise and is still shitty, with idiotic channels and rules about them.


I remember buying a few BTC at around the $20 mark, think I sold around $100. Seemed like a nerd's fever dream at that time :) I even got my CPU mining in a pool back before the GPU kernels were around and the ASICs came out. Crazy times!


"If you know of an ethically dubious way to profit, why not do it?"


You've come to the right place


Crypto is going to be worth so little next year you may as well sell it all and buy back. Btc is about to collapse


I wasn't one of those with a significant net worth in NFTs or cryptos, but it's fascinating to hear about people's experiences.

The crypto world is indeed a rollercoaster ride, with both exhilarating highs and heart-stopping lows. I'd love to hear more stories about how individuals managed and adapted during these wild swings and what they're up to now.

In case you want to mint, create or show your art, Rather Labs at https://www.ratherlabs.com could be a valuable resource for insights and solutions.


Every ones story is the same, buy in at the hype then sell when the price craters or maybe you are smart and decide to hoddl until the price has been hyped up but by then you lost your wallet / password oops.


I don’t know if you would count it as “lost” but as a college student I mined 35 bitcoins and then ending up selling them at $30.


I had eight Bitcoin when they were worth about $400. I'd check the price every day and read the speculations on the subreddits. It became a bit nerve-wracking for me thinking that BTC could potentially plunge in price to nothing, so I sold at $400. About six months later the price went moon. Oh well.


i mostly use crypto to pay for online services like a vpn and stuff. i never really treated it like a stock market stock like most people do. and the nft thing was kinda dumb. i like crypto because it's a little more private than a bank account


yes i was gambling and lost around 20k to collapsed shitcoins




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: