What is your Bitcoin profit story?
This question originally appeared on Quora, the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
Answers are by Chris Koerner, Joelseph Hines, Ron Rule, and several people who wish to be anonymous.
Answered Jan. 7
I got scammed out of 11.03 Bitcoin and it was the best thing that ever happened to me. No joke.
In the spring of 2016 I started seriously considering investing in Bitcoin, but I wasn’t a true believer of it yet. I was merely a speculator, looking for profit.
I decided to invest in a cloud mining operation – bad idea. The promise was to get your original investment back within 2–3 months. I started doing research.
The site had been around for 3 years and thousands of people had been lauding their successes about it on Twitter. I thought “if this is a scam, then it’s been going for quite some time. As long as it doesn’t take my money sometime within the next 2–3 months, before I pull out my original investment, I’ll be okay.”
So I bought 11 Bitcoin, which was about $5,000 worth at the time and send it to the cloud mining operation.
A few weeks in and things were looking golden. I was getting about 1% of my investment returned to me each day! Huge! I bought another $5k worth of BTC on Coinbase and planned to send it to this site once the payment cleared. I got greedy. Once again it was about 11 BTC worth.
While waiting for that new batch of BTC to clear, the site shut down overnight. Poof. Gone. People on Twitter were freeking out. They ran away with thousands of stolen BTC.
How could I have been so stupid? 11 BTC – gone forever. $187,000 worth in today’s dollars. Enough to pay cash for a nice house where I live.
A day or two later my new BTC cleared my Coinbase account. I was so thankful that I hadn’t sent that before the site shut down.
What do I do with this new BTC? Sell it, or hold?
I decided to hold it until it doubled in value, because that would be the same (in my eyes at the time) as me not getting scammed out of $5k. So I waited for BTC to double or triple.
6–8 months later it did! I was a genius! I sold it all, pocketing a couple thousand in profits, above what I was scammed. I felt like a genius.
Since that time I have become a true believer and evangelist in Bitcoin and in Blockchain technology. I have been slowly buying more BTC and other various altcoins as I could afford, and it has worked out quite nicely.
I won’t ever sell my BTC again until I am able to retire from it.
Why was this scam the best thing that have ever happened to me? Because if I’d have never gotten scammed then I’d have never gotten into Bitcoin. And getting into Bitcoin has been, by far, the best financial decision I’ve ever made.
Answered Dec. 31
Not Bitcoin, but I feel that I need to answer this question, as I do make pretty lofty claims in my Bio. Here is the adventure through Crypto:
Litecoin – $50
I found litecoin when it hovered around $50 smackeroons a coin, and not really knowing much about it, I decided to just toss in a few hundred and see what’d happen. Well, not a few weeks later did Litecoin soar, right past a hundred. Doubling my money, I almost decided to sell, but then I met the Litecoin subreddit, and saw that there was a big interview with the man himself, Charlie Lee. I knew this would be huge, so I hodled past it, and ended up selling at 370 a piece. This accounts for 740% of my gains. Flying pretty high after that, I heard about
Ripple – $.20-.30
I don’t quite remember how low Ripple I was when I bought it, but it was right before it sailed to the moon. A coworker kept singing its praises, and it seemed like the most economically viable. Couple that with the fact that they already had banks in on it, and plans with W3C to make Ripple the standard internet currency, I bought bought bought, using only my earnings (I used the initial investment to make a small extra dent in a tiny bit of debt I have). Well, Ripple is now sitting at $2.30, so there’s another 1,150%, but my streak wasn’t finished yet.
Verge – $.08
I’m not going to lie, I found this coin because I liked the name. After looking into it, I was super hesitant to buy, as the PR for this coin isn’t fantastic, but it does have a fervent community. After some back and forth, I invest some of my Ripple (I think it was at 1.10 or so) into Verge, and in the next 5 days, it just to max $.30, although we are sitting around $.19 now. This is 375% of my bio. And then we have:
Cardano -$.37
I heard that the creator of Ethereum worked on this coin, and he saw it as the better Ether. That alone piqued my interest, and it being a top 10 coin, I decided to bite the bullet without a lot of research. Now, since then, I’ve gained 197% and also learned why it deserves that gain. And for my final trick, we have
Ember – .000something
This was completely a joke, I swear. I threw a hundred dollars into it because I heard someone talking about it at work, making fun of it. Well, I have alerts set in my personal app to tell me of any of my coins ever explode, and this one just happened to get seriously pumped by one of the bigger names later that same day. I think it rose 2500% in the end, but I sold it at around 1275% or so, which I heard was good, because the network went down not long after.
As you can see, while some of it has been research, I’ve also gotten very lucky with my trading to now. Right now, I have a huge bet in verge, who I expect to make a dollar(in) Q1 2018. Hopefully I’ll have to update my bio soon.
Answered Jan. 8
It was 2013. I was in a lot of the more influential Internet Marketing circles at the time, and everyone was talking about this thing called Bitcoin. It was around $113, then dramatically jumped up to $400 something. People were predicting it would go to $2,000 or more, and I scoffed. “This is silly, these people are idiots.”
Then it went up to $740. I started thinking “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s something here.” and started paying attention. It went to $1,000 and I finally said screw it, I’ll just take $5k and buy some and sit on it, what’s the harm?
I created an account at Mt Gox, but couldn’t successfully get it to connect to my bank account. Their support wasn’t responsive, and I gave up after a couple days. Roughly two months later, Mt Gox was hacked and shut its doors. I considered myself lucky – their system error prevented me from buying $5K worth of Bitcoin, which would have been stolen/lost when Mt Gox went under. I swore off ever considering such a foolish thing again.
From that point, I pretty much forgot about Bitcoin until people started talking about it in 2017. Only this time, it was all over the news. It had reached $14,000 and showed no signs of stopping. A couple weeks later it hit $18,000. Being in a better cash position today than I was in 2013, I thought “What the heck, I’ll buy $20k worth and see where it goes”. I created an account at CoinBase, but their identity verification system wasn’t working. For three days in a row I tried twice a day and got nowhere. A few days later BC fell back to $14k, then $10k, and once again I considered myself lucky – because once again, a system error prevented me from buying Bitcoin right before it took a nose dive.
My Bitcoin profit story is that I’ve saved $25,000 by not buying Bitcoin.
I’m done. I don’t care if it goes to $100k, I’m not going to bother with it. The universe stepped in and bailed me out twice already, I’m not tempting fate with a third try. It’s not even a “currency” anymore, it’s a commodity.
Answered Tuesday
I bought $1000 in btc three years ago. It was all my savings and I planned to keep saving it, but btc seemed a better place to save it than in the bank. The price had fallen from over 1000 to about 350 when I bought, and I thought that was a good price. I expected it to go back to 1000 soon. But it didn’t. It just sat there at the same price month after month and I became bored with it. Then I got a tip from my ex in January 2016 about ether and said what the hell and sold all my btc for eth at about 60 cents. It went up to $10 three weeks later and I was over the moon! I didn’t sell, thinking if I waited long enough it could be worth $1 million.
It did that. Ether went up over 1500x now (it was up over 2000x when eth was at it’s high point a few weeks ago).
I quit my job last summer and have been living off ether since, and still have over $1M in ether. So yeah I’m one of the gals you hear about who turned $1000 into a million dollars. Gonna be careful with it and may never have to work again! Of course Uncle Sam is gonna want his share, still need to figure out how to do that right. Ether will probably go up 10x again in the next year, so I think Uncle Sam can have his cut and I’ll still be ok.
Some people ask if regret selling btc at about 400 when btc is now over 10 Gs. No way. That’s only 25x if kept it. Ether was a much better choice, and is still the better choice now. Maybe I should have kept my job so I’d have more money to buy more ether!
Answered Jan. 8
I was just out of high school at the time looking for extra ways to make money online. Being an avid PC gamer I had some pretty good GFX cards at the time. I remember Bitcoin was around $2 at the time and I was making about $10 a day leaving my computer run while I slept.
I was so pleased with making money doing 0 work that I invested $3000 and built 4 more computers and stuffed them with as many nvidea 8800GTX GFX cards as I could (newest most powerful card to mine Bitcoin at the time)
Needless to say I let them run a few months and made some decent money at the time. The problem was that the power used to create them was about the same as what they were worth. I was blowing up powersupplies left and right on my computer’s from all the overclocking I was doing which was becoming quite costly.. and frankly a pain in the ass. My dad just about lost his mind when he seen the power bill of around $500/month arrive in the mail, and promptly put an end to my Bitcoin mining (mind you with massive fights in my end)
Even at the time I knew there was something special about Bitcoin and decided to keep everything I had mined. Fast forward to today and I have around 15 million in Bitcoin at 26 years old. And $10 million in alt coins (was early adopter of NEO (antshares), ethereum, OMG, BAT, EOS and a slew of other shit coins.
Today im still working a blue collar job. I haven’t cashed in a dime yet. My plan is to sell when Bitcoin hits 100k and invest everything into real estate, property development and the marijuana industry in Canada. There is no doubt in my mind Bitcoin will make me a billionaire eventually.
Read more at Quora, the knowledge sharing network where compelling questions are answered by people with unique insights.
