Replies

Sorry, I missed answering the question "have I been scammed?" I'll broaden this to include losses in general. I've hit a fair share of home runs, obviously, in my cryptocurrency investing. But I've also stepped on my fair share of land mines. Here's a summary of negative experiences:

1. I've lost track of the number of exchanges I've used over the years that have subsequently gone bust, taking any customer funds on the exchange with them. I dodged at least 8 or 9 bullets (not leaving funds on an exchange that subsequently went bust) before being caught by the Bitgrail debacle at the end of 2017/early 2018. In that case a small exchange basically run out of some Italian's basement became hugely popular overnight due to the explosion of interest in NANO and it being one of the few exchanges offering it, but the lone operator had pre-existing security flaws and was completely in over his head when problems emerged. "We have suffered a stolen" still makes me cringe.

2. ~2018 the US government bureaucracy decreed that Americans shouldn't be able to earn crypto by lending to margin traders. There are many ways to lose money in crypto but this was not one of them. Exchanges have done a great job with circuit-breakers that close out positions before a margin trader becomes unable to pay back a lender, and in the few cases where that didn't work in my experience the exchange always covered the loss, rather than get a reputation as a risky place to lend.

In the aftermath of the decree from Washington a gaggle of companies sprang up offering crypto investors the chance to earn a yield with their crypto. I naively assumed they had either found a way around the rules or were politically-connected types who'd lobbied for an exemption, and that they were just middlemen to get back into lending to the margin traders. Instead, there was no transparency, no government requirements or oversight, and they were actually doing things like lending to Chinese loan shark operations that couldn't get regular banking access. Every one of these companies has now gone bankrupt. I lost heavily in the first two before pulling out. Americans remain 2nd-rate citizens on the world markets due to this malicious interference by the SEC and other bureaucratic regimes in Washington.

3. If you invest in cryptocurrency, particularly smaller projects, you need to pay attention. Sometimes they will enact upgrades that are not backwards compatible, with only a limited window to update your own wallet. Any decent project should avoid this, but there are too many out there that just assumed everyone investing with them is a hyper-obsessed techie who is paying close attention to their project. So I've had the experience of being told "sorry, there's no way to convert your coins now, you missed the window." Again, that shouldn't happen with any decent well-run project with a more centralized team, but beware the smaller cryptos.