Although I have planned several great interviews, today you will have to bear with me only. This will be a solo episode about stuff I wanted to share with you…
Just like everyone out there my crypto journey too has a learning curve… and in the process I have made several common but painful newbie mistakes.
When I spoke to people from crypto it appeared that similar things happen often and many have gone through same things.
Some say that
people learn from their mistakes but the smart ones learn from other people’s mistakes.
So I thought “well… I am willing to be that other person”.
I’d like to share my newbie mistakes, so you don’t have to repeat them yourself and save you the trouble of going through the whole “shit! How could I have been so stupid” phase.
So here we go – all my embarrassing stupid mistakes one by one…
The first one was the crypto transfer mistake…
As most of you probably already know by now is that the beauty of the blockchain is that it is discentralization… but also just because of that once you send out your crypto to the wrong place poof – it’s lost forever.
So as you know, I earned my very first crypto on Steemit (obviously, since you read it here – DUH!).
I spoke with people + read a bit and realized that I had to send it to bittex if I wanted to change it. I went and opened an account on Bittrex. That part went well…
Then I had to send Steem Dollars from my Steemit account to Bittrex… which I did BUT… I forgot to copy and paste the long chain of characters and numbers that I had no clue back then were so important…
It took me few minutes to realize that the transfer was sent to… basically what I thought was nowhere. It did come out of my Steemit account but obviously it did not reach my Bittrex account.
And to have made things even worse – I did not do a test transfer with a very small amount in order to see how it worked… instead I had transferred everything I had earned… yup
So luckily I got that back… but it took few days and support emails and hustle… and I think that if I had made the mistake somewhere else and not on the Steemit platform (I was sending the steel dollars to the bitter account on Steemit – then I would not have been able to recover the funds.
So 2 lessons learnt there
- do a test transfer with a very small amount in order to figure out how it works and make sure that you’ve figured out how to make it right
- never forget to pay attention and double check the transfers and make sure you have not forgotten to include anything before pushing the button!
The second big mistake was last summer – when Bitcoin had the fork to Bitcoin Cash.
It was just few days after I had successfully moved my Steem Dollars to Bittrex and exchanged half of those to Bitcoin.
You may think awesome – all she needed to do is – basically do nothing.
Just keep them there, right?
Well… I didn’t – I read some stuff online, then spoke to few people who were in crypto and I have no idea why and how… but I ended up selling my bitcoins just before the fork…
Yup… Bitcoin Cash rate is now over $400…
And that’s lesson number 3 – don’t listen to what people tell – do your own research.
Get your info from credible sources and make your own conclusions and decisions… and don’t make stupid ones.
Ok and now we get to the 3rd and most painful mistake…
So I was cumulating my small crypto portfolio through Steemit and was super happy with what I had managed to cumulate so far. And I was even happier that I had bought my Bitcoin when it was priced around $3k.
Then I was told (correctly so) that it is not very safe keeping the crypto on exchanges and that I needed a wallet – so I downloaded the bit pay wallet on my smartphone and moved the bitcoin there… so far so good.
When I was setting up the wallet it gave me a backup security phrase which was 12 completely random words. I was supposed to keep it in a safe place…
All was good, until I changed my phone. The phone got backed up – I upgraded to a new phone by leaving the old one in the Apple store.
Dates later I decided to check the wallet and … surprise! it was asking me the backup phrase. Those 12 random words…
I had the phrase written in my notebook. And than I moved countries… those who have moved countries with a family know what a mess the whole process may become. No wonder I had lost the notebook in the process… Could not find a screenshot of it anywhere either…
This means that there is no way to access or restore the wallet – which means that I need to accept the fact that I totally fucked up.
I beat myself up now for being so unserious, unorganized and completely guilty of the whole thing…
Bye bye Bitcoin…(
And here is the last lesson for today…
Take passwords, verifications and backup phrases serious. Keep your private keys safe.
Back up the back ups of the back ups…
That’s all for now!