[ExI] My personal "intelligence" failure regarding Bitcoin...

[John Clark]

On Sun, Jan 25, 2015 at 1:51 AM, Stuart LaForge <avant at sollegro.com> wrote:

>
> Don't feel so bad, John. You didn't profit but neither did you lose. I too
> have a tale of woe regarding bitcoin. I bought 120 btc from MtGox back in
> 2011 at about $8 per when MtGox was the only exchange with any  reputation.
>
> Because my computer is old and slow, except for some experimentation, I
> never transferred the btc into my wallet. I figured I was going to be
> trading on the highs and lows anyway so I left my bitcoins in my MtGox
> account as I would stocks on E-trade or a similar online brokerage account.
>
> When the price went through the roof back at the end of 2013, I sold off
> my coins for about $60,000. I was congratulating myself for having made a
> $59,000 profit on a $1000 investment.
>
> But when I tried to get my $60,000 wired back to my bank account, the
> nightmare began. MtGox started demanding copies of my ID, bank account
> statements, and even some kind of letter from my bank to prove that I was
> who I said I was. This was all despite the fact that it was the same bank
> account from which I had wired Gox my original $1000.
>
> Well needless to say, I started get really nervous about sending all
> manner of personal info to them especially when the forums were full of
> people saying they had sent all their info months earlier and still had not
> gotten their money. So I bought back into bitcoin at a loss, upgraded my
> wallet, and tried to transfer the bitcoins out of MtGox at which point,
> they announced that they were halting all bitcoin withdrawals. Then a few
> weeks later MtGox declared bankruptcy.
>
> So I guess what I am trying to say is that I got into bitcoin early but
> still managed to lose $60,000 (really only $1000 & 2 yrs of waiting) and
> feel kind of idiotic because of it. So don't feel bad for not making money
> in bitcoin if you didn't lose any either.
>

There are worst Bitcoin stories, A man names James Howell in the UK
mined 7,500 Bitcoins in 2009 on his home computer but then lost interest in
it. A few year later he junked his old computer, including the hard drive,
and sent it to a landfill. Then in late 2013 when he realized it was worth
millions he talked to the dump manager to ask where his old computer might
be, he said it was burred between 3 and 5 under potentially hazardous waste
in a area the size of a soccer field. He never found it.

 John K Clark
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20150125/793abbd0/attachment.html>