My Good and not so Good Adventures with Bitcoins

I learned about the existence of Bitcoins in May 2011. At this time I was living in Miami, Florida. I immediately thought that it was a fantastic concept and I looked for as much information as possible. I read the white paper and I was fascinated by the concept of the blockchain (I still am!).
I decided to put some money into Bitcoins.

I opened an account on MtGOX and I transferred US$1,500 to it.
On May 15th, I bought 200 BTC at US$7 for a total of US$1,400.

I told my wife about this and explained to her that we will become rich with this "investment". Of course, she called me crazy and she expected that I will lose all the money that I invested. But, she said that if I would get $10,000 out of it, then this will pay for a cruise for the two of us.
I agreed to that.

Three weeks later, in June 2011, I was in Paris, visiting the French office of the company I work for. I explained to one of my colleagues that I had bought 200 BTC and that I will make money with them. Like my wife, he thought I was crazy and that I would lose my money.
I did not want to look stupid if my colleague and my wife were right and that Bitcoins would not work. So, as the price of Bitcoins reached US$30 on June 9th 2011, I sold 50 BTC and got back my US$1,500.

After the peak of US$30 in June, the price of Bitcoins went down for several months. It was close to US$2 on November 2011. I had my "free" 150 BTC in my MtGOX account and I was not thinking of selling any of them. If the concept of Bitcoins would not catch, then too bad, but as I already got my money back, I was not worried. The price of Bitcoins did not reach US$10 before August 2012.

Then, starting in January 2013, the price went from $12 to $50 in mid March, $100 on April Fool day and finally over $200 on April 9th, probably due to the Cyprus bail-in. That was a temporary high. Bitcoins was getting a lot of bad press with the Silk Road. MtGOX was starting to have some trouble with the "authorities".
But I still kept my 150 BTC in my MtGOX account.

Then, there was the big surge in the fourth quarter of 2013: from less than $130 at the beginning of October to over $1100 on November 9th.
I was back in Vancouver, Canada then. I opened an account in a Canadian exchange (that has since been bought by Kraken) and transfered 11 BTC to this account. I sold 10 BTC when the price reached CDN$1,000.
I had made CDN$10,000. That was enough money for the cruise that I had promised my wife.
I was happy with my Bitcoin adventure so far. And I still had 140 BTC.

Then, the troubles started.

I invested around 35 BTC in a "cloud hashing" company. With the fees and the competition, this investment went nowhere and I lost everything. But, as you may have guessed already, the worth was to come, because I still had 105 BTC in my MtGOX account.

As you may know, MtGOX closed in February 2014 and went into receivership. Mark Karpeles, the CEO of MtGOX, was arrested in August 2014. I may get something out of the bankruptcy of MtGOX that is still going on, but not much.
I consider that the adventure that started 3 years before is at an end.

I should never have left my Bitcoins in the account at MtGOX. I learned this lesson the hard way, and I will not make this mistake again. A cryptocurrency exchange is to be used only temporarily when doing an exchange, not to keep BTC or money for the long term.

I have started again buying Bitcoins and I still believe in it, and the blockchain.
And in STEEM, of course!

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