Reddit lost money bitcoin

Beyond Bitcoin: The wild world of altcoin cryptocurrency trading

Case in point: Adam's foray into DeTrade. The touted technology behind it wasn't real.

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I've lost more than 8k before and ive run the gambet of crap jobs. I lost all my crypto and fiat funds, and have no one to blame but myself. But you're still alive, you're still healthy, you're still young. It looks like you loss under 1BTC total. Psychologists have long understood that extrinsic rewards for behavior tend to swamp intrinsic rewards —that if you hook social behavior to money, it immediately becomes all about the money. Pay off your debt and slowly get back into crypto if you wish and feel comfortable enough doing so. ViacomCBS and Discovery have rallied this year.

Nothing about the project was. DeTrade, for all intents and purposes, didn't exist. It was a scam. Those behind it, operating in the unregulated world of crypto, vanished. Adam got into cryptocurrency in September. When we spoke, it felt like he'd crammed years of trading into two months.

Adam had seen some tempestuous trading in recent weeks.

Bitcoin is a prototype

But despite the community's enthusiasm, there's a small problem. Right now cryptocurrencies don't really do anything.

I LOST MONEY ON BITCOIN - VLOG 017

Investing in a stock means ascertaining its value -- based on factors like competition, risks and, above all, profit generation -- and then putting money into ones that are undervalued. If other investors follow you, the stock rises, giving you an opportunity to take profit. Speculation is naturally part of this: The Dot-com Bubble was all about pouring money into "pre-profit" companies in the hopes they'd make money someday. Cryptocurrency, however, takes speculation into the stratosphere.

For the most part, cryptocurrency is pure speculation. People are investing in technology that produces nothing, and has no practical application. That's a little over four times the price of an Apple share.

Million-dollar joke

Doge, a coin marketed after the internet slang for "dog," doubled in value earlier this month after a pornstar tweeted about it. After the price settled, it then rocketed once more when Reddit wanted to make it the GameStop of cryptocurrency. David Gerard is one such skeptic. His most recent focuses on Libra , Facebook's ill-fated attempt at digital currency. All of this is about the psychology of get-rich-quick schemes.

In his years working as an IT systems administrator, Gerard's job has been to examine new technology and discern what's useful and what's not. Cryptocurrency, he told me, is not.

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This is the allure of "shitcoins. That's no exaggeration. Cryptocurrencies are mined using powerful computers, and many enterprising types put together farms of computers used solely for the purpose of mining Bitcoin. As a result, Bitcoin is responsible for more energy consumption than Switzerland. Gerard says the only thing you can do with Bitcoin is buy it and sell it.

He's even harsher on altcoins.

Even by the standards of Bitcoin, altcoins are useless," he said. This is precisely what makes them so fascinating. Seemingly, all they can do is get internet punters to bet on their success. But this enables average people to become rich. That Meme coin I mentioned before? Crypto Spider has made millions with altcoins. Crypto Spider isn't his real name. Like most people in the cryptocurrency community, he goes by a pseudonym. He's gained renown in some Telegram groups over the past few months thanks to a "2K to 1M" challenge, where he endeavored to see how quickly, and with how few trades, he could turn the first number into the second.

In cryptocurrency, you can follow someone's portfolio if you have their wallet number, so the community was able to watch this challenge play out in real time. Like Adam, Crypto Spider has no background in finance or trading. He lists college courses in game theory, basic algorithmics and some economics as useful to his crypto exploits -- but in essence he's a self-taught amateur.

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He declined to tell me his specific age, only that he was "20ish" when he first got into cryptocurrency in He admits he was attracted by the "pretty numbers," by seeing coins magnify in value 30, 40 and 50 times within a short period. He was enthusiastic enough to start a university club around cryptocurrencies, and how they'd be used in the future. Crypto Spider says cryptocurrency will play a "major part in the future of finance," and speaks with the passion of a believer.

Risk and reward

13 votes, 32 comments. So I've never traded anything like stocks or Bitcoin I was wondering how people loose money if the price of Bitcoin coin. a bit of money into it, and was fine with losing it or not. so fast forward, i lived in new york and was able to find a local who actually sold bulks of bitcoin through.

He breathlessly transitions from how cryptocurrency is a part of the internet's evolution to the possible use cases of blockchain , the technology behind Bitcoin, in the next 10 years. But despite his enthusiasm, I couldn't help but notice how chunks of what he said echoed Gerard. Cryptocurrencies are mined using powerful computers. More emissions are produced by global Bitcoin miners than by the entire country of Switzerland.

For one thing, he looks back at all the projects he was excited about in and realizes most were almost entirely vaporware, technology that's advertised but never delivered. Gerard calls the cryptocurrency community a pool of scammers. Spider notes that people often invest in altcoins they know don't have a function, because there's enough hype around the project to make money. I somehow was able to game all the other people.

Hopefully you'll take something away from this experience.

Eventually I got a job, paid off loans, car, and now I'm debt free and actually have a nice bank account. You're still super young. If you even have a speck of knowledge to mess with crypto to begin with then you'll definitely make back the money you lost and more. Believe it or not this is a good thing.

It's better to completely fuck yourself over when you're young and learn from your mistakes than when you're older and have more to lose. You've learned a valuable lesson, one that you'll never make again. Everyone that's ever played the market has learned this, me included. Things can only go up when you're the lowest you can be. Yeah it's true. This doesnt just relate to finances either.

In my early 20s I lived an extremely unhealthy lifestyle and managed to give myself chronic fatigue syndrome by recklessly abusing my body. It fucked me for 4 years and I was frequently on the verge of suicide. But I managed to completely change my life and eventually recovered. During this time I met older people with CFS who got it in their 40s and never recovered.

Now when I see people in their 40s still eating like shit and abusing substances I know that they are playing a dangerous game, because it's a lot harder to recover from chronic illness in your 40s than your 20s.