I am going to share unrelated stories about Bitcoin from Reddit in this thread for entertainment and education. There are thousands of posts there on the subject, so if I find a gem, I will post it here, so we can document this raging bubble for prosperity, reminding us of the late 90s.... ----------------------------------------------------------- Average Joes are buying into the hype "Two co-workers of mine in the past week came up to me and talked to me about bitcoins. One was asking me how to mine ("What computer in the computer store can I build to make at least $100-200 a day? I just want some passive income so I don't need to work too much) and that he was thinking of buying $50K worth of coins as the value was going up very fast. (Actually after the conversation, he revealed to me that he had already bought $50k of bitcoins 2 days ago (at $700) and was just asking me what I thought of it. Heh. I wasn't amused.) Another one was spending all his savings(all $800 of it)/salary for the past 2-3 weeks on bitcoins. He said he's been reading the article and everything points to bitcoins going up. He also mentioned to me that he had read that the target price of bitcoin was $23,000. He said he wanted to buy a house and bitcoin seems to be the only way to do it. I facepalmed so hard. Basically two guys. Investing everything they got into bitcoins but they don't even understand what they're even investing into. They were asking me very basic questions that any bitcoiner would know the answers to. One even asked me who the inventor of bitcoin was and that he wanted to know his email so he can ask for some help. LOL. The other said he didn't own a computer so he just stored all his coins in an online wallet (hint: it's not blockchain). Oh lord. Oh and here's another one. This just actually fucking happened 1 hour ago. An old classmate of mine (haven't seen in 8 years) just added me on FB. Told me that he heard from people that I'm a bitcoiner. He asked me if I had 100 bitcoins to sell to him and he would pay me in cash immediately. He said he "would pay at market value of $700". Straight away I told him that is not the market value at all and that he was about $150~ off. After I had told him that, he kinda backpedaled and said uh I see. That's too expensive. Never mind and went away. The amount of blind greed I've seen in the last 2-3 weeks is just... horrifying." Q:"Where do you work that your co-worker has 50k laying around to just spend on a technology he doesn't fully understand!?" "Machine operator/mech at a major Australian company. Actually I found out from another coworker that it wasn't all his money. He found about 2-3 other friends and they pooled up and bought coins together all in one wallet (and hopefully to become millionaires). I think one of them actually got a loan to do this."Two co-workers of mine in the past week came up to me and talked to me about bitcoins. One was asking me how to mine (
I remember seeing a story a while back about a dude buying $36k worth from credit cards, dude is a millionaire now if he held .
There was a bet at Goldman Sachs about the time frame when bitcoin would hit $20 again. The traders were putting in 1K each and the purse was up to 50K I think. The farest guess out was next February. I guess that guy is probably going to win it...
I like this one: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rcsht/so_about_1_year_ago_i_bought_1500_or_so_worth_of/
I am not going to copy it here, because it is a freaking long story about a crazy experience while selling bitcoins locally, it includes viruses too: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1re0p8/my_craziest_experience_selling_bitcoin/
...and this is what happens to the stupid: "So about a week ago, I stumbled upon http://www.mcxnow.com/. It looked pretty cool: the owner was active in the chat(troll box), the layout looked nice, and the exchange had a cool system where the owner got 50% of the fees, 25% were given back to the users, and the other 25% were represented by "mcxFEE" shares which anyone could buy. I was interested, and the fee's were at a pretty low price, so I bought a couple at .18 btc each. I started talking to the owner and sending some suggestions for the exchange, and everything was looking pretty good. Then today I got on and saw that the shares were up to .25 btc. I was getting ready to sell my shares and send the bitcoins to my btc-e account so I could buy myself a laptop, when the website shuts down. It shows an "MCXNOW IS DOWN FOR MAINTENANCE" page and I think "Huh, well that sucks...". Two hours later, same thing. I do some googling and Bitcointalk searching, and figure out that the owner of mcxnow, Realsolid, has been involved in some scams before. Well, now I'm panicking, because I have very few bitcoins and most of my very tiny bit-wealth was on mcxnow. Luckily, the website went back up and I could breathe again; unfortunately I was now greeted with a page stating "All Trading Stopped. Withdraw Your Coins Before December 20th.". Turns out Realsolid decided that the stress of handling support tickets for an exchange was too much for him, and rather than buy back the fee shares or hire someone to handle support, he decided to just let the share holders take the fall. All trading was frozen on the site except for mcxFEE to bitcoin, and the price rapidly dropped to less than a quarter of what it had been. He did not cancel buy orders from before the website's crash. Furthermore, he spent about an hour on the chat saying that the users should be grateful he didn't just steal all of their coins and that he has no obligation to shareholders of mcxnow to keep the exchange running. He also called the people in the chat box "noobs" and other insults. So much for my laptop tl;dr : Don't trust Bitcoin exchanges that don't have: --An actual legally-recognized business --A public address --Any public information"
Losing 300 BTC (worths 360K dollars) in a few minutes at a betting site using martingale. He started with 0.16 BTC : http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1rnsof/user_xyz2013_just_tried_to_double_his_016_btc/ "he was betting at 33% for 3x payout. Odds of him losing 11 times in a row is 1.16%."