My Biggest Cryptocurrency Disaster | How Much Money I Have Managed to Lose to Date

There is definitely a bit of a learning curve to cryptocurrency trading much like any other learned skill. Now depending on your history and background that curve can be anything from minor all the way up to disastrous. When I got started I had absolutely no idea how cryptocurrency worked, where it came from, how to buy it and where to store it. Now obviously the smart thing to do would be to read and study the system so that you would have a basic understanding of how things worked before investing money into it. Unfortunately I have always struggled learning things that way and find the fastest and most efficient way is to dive in head first and figure it out as I go. Even though the concept of this decentralized currency has always sparked my interest, I never saw the full potential of this technology or even took it very seriously until I was financially invested. Once I got my feet wet by purchasing my first $100 of Bitcoins I started transferring, trading and buying things using this new revolutionary currency. It was at this point that I started to see and understand all of the endless possibilities that this currency had to offer. The more I got into the technology the more certain I became that these virtual coin algorithms will absolutely disrupted and obliterate the current financial industry as we know it making large businesses such as Paypal and Western Union obsolete.

When you are first starting out, there seems to be multiple ways of easily screwing up and losing your money. Everything from incorrectly typing in the address to accidentally sending Bitcoin to a Bitcoin Cash wallet. All of this without the ability of reversing or canceling the transaction once sent.

Now, when I talk about the money that I have lost I will be excluding scenarios such as a bad trade, shorting a rising coin or anything else to do with general unlucky trading issues like not paying attention to withdrawal fees or setting a Bitcoin transaction fee way to high. The type of loses I am referring to are similar to the ones you hear about on the news, like the time a guy from England who mined Bitcoin back when it was only a few cents a coin accidentally threw his hard drive in the garbage, which based on current BTC prices contained over $750 Million. Thankfully my most costly mistake did not set me back millions of dollars like the previous story, but considering that Bitcoins price has rose so much I still to this day kick myself over it.

This brings us to my largest, most costly mistake to date. Now granted, it could have been much worse and at the time it was very disheartening but you have to move on. The issue, is that I lost the money in the most frustrating idiotic way imaginable.
During my beginning trial period with cryptocurrency, I was trying to find the best currency exchange along with a wallet that met all of my needs. I started to test out different offline and online wallets when I came across a very cool website that offered extremely secure and anonymous Bitcoin storage. Due to exploring so many different wallets I never put too much thought into the setup of any of them as I only ended up using one or two out of the 15 or more that I tried. Well because this wallet was anonymous they did not require an email address, name or any other personal information that you generally rely on in order to do things like recover a password. Instead, the recovery method involved a sentence that was made up of random words which you were supposed to print off and store offline in case of an emergency. Initially I had no intention of using this wallet so I just skipped right through the setup in order to see the user interface.

Fast forward a couple of weeks and after experimenting with a few different wallets I landed back on this secured one. At this point I decided to transfer 0.42 Bitcoin into the wallet, which at the time was worth around $400 USD. After storing the coins for a month or so I logged back into the site in order to withdraw the money so that I could pay for some computer upgrades. It was at this point that it asked me for my 4 digit confirmation pin to complete the transaction. Unfortunately my mind was blank and for the life of me I could not remember the exact combination. I had a rough idea of what it could be and eventually boiled it down to 6 or 7 possibilities.
On the fifth failed attempt I received a notification saying that my account has been locked due to too many incorrect attempts and that it required that stupid little phrase that I was too lazy to write down. Just like that my heart sunk into my chest and that was it. Nothing could be done except stare at that 0.42 BTC in the balance section as it sat, stuck in limbo for eternity. Now the really brutal part of all this was that I was still able to log in and go through my entire account, but I was locked out from making any withdrawals or account changes.

As the months went on and Bitcoin continued to climb I was constantly haunted by that 0.42 which at today's rate is worth around $7560!!

Well I hope you enjoyed my little tale and I would love to hear from other people who might have a similar story or experience.

Tell me about your biggest cryptocurrency mistake in the comment section below.

Until next time!

Sincerely,
Grayson