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Ask HN: Anyone lost a lot of money with NFTs/Cryptos? What's your story?

by agent008t on 10/24/23, 1:35 PM with 37 comments

• by joshstrange on 10/24/23, 6:42 PM

  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.

• by NorwegianDude on 10/24/23, 3:19 PM

  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.

• by SeanAnderson on 10/24/23, 3:20 PM

  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.

• by kylebenzle on 10/24/23, 2:15 PM

  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.

• by ezedv on 10/24/23, 5:07 PM

  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.

• by dangerface on 10/24/23, 3:24 PM

  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.

• by ryaneager on 10/24/23, 10:42 PM

  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.

• by secretcombos on 10/24/23, 5:15 PM

  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.

• by goodboyjojo on 10/26/23, 1:03 PM

  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

• by Souzana on 10/24/23, 8:18 PM

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