How I Lost $2 Million Worth Of Crypto

This is a true story.

The story below will be a hard and fast account.

Why?

Ughh..well because I just told you I lost $2 Million. It’s not exactly something I like to think about if you know what I'm saying.

How it started.

Back in 2013 when Dogecoin was first created I jumped on the bandwagon and began instantly buying it. It was actually more like 2014 because if I recall the thing was released in December and I started immediately buying in January.

I even had a few email exchanges with one of the creators Jackson Palmer for shits and gigs. We spoke about smoking joints and I think I tried to pitch him my ‘EpicCoin’ idea where the mascot would be Chuck Norris and something about machine guns and eagles (still a good idea BTW).

You can see some of my emails, purchases and communications with sellers below. This was all back when you could buy crypto straight off of eBay or from mining nerds on dodgy forums, proper p2p style, no exchange, no third party no bs.

Yep, that’s right I’m a straight-up crypto OG *smug face*.

Somehow with a mixture of continuous buying, hodling and playing Dogecoin roulette I ended up with about 2 Million DOGE.

Did you say roulette?

Yes. I’ve played roulette for years. At this point, I was using a sleeper Martingale system which is using the law of averages to point out when there have been no reds or black, odds, evens for a certain amount of spins and so the law of averages states that this particle position is now more likely to be landed on.

Some time went on, I had assumed the Doge meme coin was over and so I gambled more of it on roulette thinking who cares it's not worth anything. Only to lose a bunch of it and then ended up selling the rest to ape into some other thing.

Just as fast as I had bought, hodled and won 2 million Dogecoins, I gambled it all away and sold it for probably less than what I paid for it. I honestly cannot remember what I sold it for but I remember it being about the same or less.

Dogecoin hit a high of around AUD 0.81c in May 2021.

As I say, I can’t recall the exact amount I held, but from my memory and the emails, I have dug through I'm very confident I had around 2 million Dogecoins.

Doing the math; this works out to be $1,620,000 (1.6 million dollars)

So where did the rest come from?

A couple of years later I had started a similar buy and hodl strategy with a coin I have written about extensively called Maidsafecoin (MAID). I had learnt my lessons from gambling but was just about to learn a few lessons about trading…

Over the years my strategy had worked well, really well in fact and I had accumulated approximately 140k MAID.

At its peak MAID hit AUD 1.60 meaning an additional $293,000 and a total of AUD 1,913,000 (1.9 million dollars)

Have a look at the chart below.

How it ended.

Here is where it all went wrong.

Instead of being patient, watching the markets and getting sell orders ready. I did the exact opposite.

I stopped being patient and started trading my MAID which slowly ate into my accumulated bags of treasure. Why? Because I am not a trader. I f*cked up constantly. I couldn’t time the market, I was impatient and emotional and through this combination and a general lack of education and understanding of trading, I had lost almost all of it. Pretty sure I even traded while drunk once or twice and also traded while at my day job in secret.

So when the time came to sell I didn’t have anything left.

Here is the kicker.

Both Dogecoin and Maidsafecoin peaked around the same time last year. MAID peaked in April and DOGE peaked in May. Had I held onto my bags, I could have sold within a 2-month period and sailed off into the sunset having almost 2 Million Mother F*cking Dollars.

The cherry on top was when my 63-year-old dad asked me to recover his DOGE from an old laptop because he wanted to sell. My dad didn’t even know how much he had stashed away, had forgotten his passwords and his computer wasn’t working properly.

I had told him to buy DOGE, years earlier, when I was buying it and so he did. He kept it all and forgot about it. It took me 3 days to recover the coins from his old laptop and once I sold them all for him he wound up with around 3–4 grand.

I was thanked by my dad with a bottle of scotch that we both enjoyed over a cigar and a conversation about how stupid I am. My dad seemed quietly satisfied that he was smarter and wiser than his 35-year-old smart ass son.

You could argue, and believe me, I have, that well Andrei, you never really had the 2 Million in your pocket and so you didn’t really lose it. And that is true. But still, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I f*cked up. It is what it is.

I don’t know what the moral of this story is or even if there is one. Anyone that follows me on Twitter knows I’m truly a believer in the freedom providing aspects of these technologies, behind the cryptocurrencies themselves, and that is one thing that can never be taken away from me or anyone else. The future is bright.

And in a way, I know I made good decisions along the way, I just messed up at the end. I f*cked up the landing. Practice makes perfect.

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