10 Ways to Lose your Bitcoin: A Retrospective

I've been around a while, and I was thinking today about the myriad of ways people have been separated from their coins over the years. Off the top of my head:

1. Internet Theft
   Your money was stolen by thieves via an insecure hot wallet, malware, a clever phishing scheme, or otherwise unwittingly exposing your keys to the internet.
2. You Forgot
   You lost or forgot keys, passphrases, hidden seed locations, etc. Perhaps you threw an old hard drive away. Or possibly, you had an overcomplicated "high security" setup you neglected to document.
3. Counterparty bankruptcy
   You left coins on an exchange or other custodian that went bankrupt.
4. Altcoin Hype
   Amidst the narrative that some newer, more innovative coin may well overtake bitcoin, you "diversified" into altcoins. In 2017, this was the market-savvy view and there was enormous hype.
5. Yield Farming Bubble
   You wanted MORE bitcoin for your bitcoin. 12% guaranteed interest? What could go wrong? See #3 for the answer.
6. Paper Bitcoin Wallet hack
   Paper wallets were popular before hardware wallets became the norm. But you used the popular bitcoin paper wallet site after it was sold and then altered by thieves to produce compromised wallets.
7. Hard Forks
   You sided with a bitcoin fork, and therefore ended up trading BTC for a comparatively worthless coin.
8. Panic Sold
   The price crashed (again) and you sold at the bottom, only for it to reach a new all time high later.
9. Propaganda
   You sold for moral reasons, after buying into mainstream negative press about bitcoin. It will boil the ocean. It's used by criminals. It's for right-wing extremists. Etc.
10. Impatience
    You didn't get rich quick enough, so you sold to buy whatever someone told you is the next big thing.

For those who fell to any of these and more, my heart goes out to you. For me, #4 got me. I had that Web 3.0, flippening, tech startup mentality, before eventually becoming a toxic bitcoin maximalist.

Whenever people say bitcoin holders didn't have to do anything, technically they are correct. But just look at all the things they had to avoid doing.

What did I miss? Which of these got you?

Submitted July 05, 2023 at 08:40AM by PoeCollector https://ift.tt/84pBROv