A Stupid Mistake Which May Cost Me 3,000 STEEM
Rule number one in cryptocurrency is if you don't control the private key, you don't own it.
A couple days ago when the price of STEEM mooned, I quickly transferred my SBD and STEEM to Poloniex with the goal of selling high and buying low. I've done this before with SBD, and it worked rather well. Things were humming along until I realized my STEEM transfer wasn't showing up in my Poloniex account.
Yep. I screwed up. I've been doing bitcoin transfers including exchange transfers since early 2013. You'd think I'd be proficient at it by now, right?
It turns out, I screwed up pasting in the memo field:
That's not the right memo. I must have accidentally pasted the account in both the memo and account fields. The STEEM made it to Poloniex, but not to my wallet there.
I promptly opened a support ticket.
Two days old with no response. :(
This was my own mistake and now I'm at the mercy of Poloniex to fix it. Every time you use an exchange, you're putting yourself at risk. I've watched so many exchanges get hacked over the years that I've lost count. I know the risks and hopefully you can learn from my mistakes.
Always double and triple check the account and memo fields when transferring to an exchange.
And, if possible, avoid keeping cryptocurrency on an exchange as much as possible. Get in, make your trade, and get out. Back up your private keys securely in multiple places.
Will I eventually get my STEEM back? I think so. I hope so. It's all on the blockchain so I can prove ownership and Poloniex has been dealing with DDoS attacks and massive Ethereum losses lately, so my support ticket is probably really low on their priority list. Still a bummer though. I would have enjoyed selling STEEM high and buying it back low to increase my holdings. Now I'll just be happy to get back my STEEM.
Steemit should add a withdraw to exchange field that saves your deposit MEMO and exchange account name. It would probably take 1 day to implement and would save users tens of thousands of dollars over time.
Much easier to withdraw to an account selected from a list rather than having to enter a manual transfer every time.
I agreed. Bittrex recently added a similar feature with whitelisted withdrawal addresses/accounts and it works quite well. Makes a lot of sense. Would you envision this being stored on blockchain via the profile JSON or just as a browser storage feature?
Good Idea!
yes!
What's up? Did you receive help regarding this from Polo?
I actually got an email 3 days ago from them! I'm waiting to do a full post on it until they reactivate the Steem wallet. It's still listed as Temporarily Disabled.
Pfff I hope it works out for the best
Measure twice, cut once.
Exactly. I've done this so many times, triple checking the account name and memo. It's still shocking to think how easily I screwed this up. I was just going too fast, getting too cocky.
Very good advice
I Pray that you get your Steem back! God Bless!
There is a simple solution that allows you to store your funds on the exchange. It is called the DEX. Just sayin..
HAhah... I'm a big fan of the BitShares DEX and have blogged about it before. :)
Unfortunately, the volume simply isn't there yet. It's a chicken/egg problem, for sure, but for quick trades when the market is doing crazy stuff, it's hard to beat the big exchanges. That said, I completely missed the opportunity here, so even with the low volume and slippage, I might have done better on the DEX.
The DEX has the advantage of pairing with BTS. It is nervewrecking ;-)
Yeah... I made this mistake too.
It sucks. I got the first response 5 days after I opened my ticket, but so far it has been 22 days overall and I haven't gotten my money yet. There has been some forward progress in the process, so I am hopeful they will eventually do the right thing, but the response time is abysmally slow.
Wow, 22 days?!? I didn't expect to wait that long. Wow. Sorry to hear that.
It's so cool that you've been doing this since 2013! I just got involved a couple weeks ago and I'm still a bit lost. Do you have any favorite resources / websites to reference that delve deeper into what exactly blockchain technology is/cryptocurrenices, etc? Thank you and I hope all works out with this as well.
https://www.weusecoins.com/ is a good place to start. If you want more details on what a blockchain actually is, I love this video. I've written a lot of stuff on my old blog about bitcoin, but it's pretty dated. I'm thinking of doing some information videos on it, I just need to find the time.
Thank you for taking the time to respond & share this with me!
Cheers,
Aurora
Jenkies!! Sorry to hear that, Luke. I hope you get it resolved quickly. On the plus side, this post has already made some serious cash haha!
Hah! Thanks Jed. Yeah, kinda surprising. Almost reminds me of the early days of huge payouts. I expect the flag patrol to come along eventually and hit my recent posts with downvotes due to "disagreements about payouts."
Let's not mention them. Kinda like Bloody Mart or Beetlejuice. They don't exist if we don't acknowledge them by name. Shhh
Hahah. Some people let powerful accounts which control payouts dictate their actions. That leads to self-censorship (or worse, playing "agree-with-the-SP" game). I'm not a fan of that.
Jeez... Yeah.. Now that you mention it, I do agree that it's becoming more prevalent. That sheeple mentality.
Aww I'm So sorry this happened! I hope you get your money back. That is a really scary situation, and I feel like it's easy to mess up. I wonder if there will ever be away to simplify it.
It's so simple, maybe that's the issue. We just need to slow down, double check, and not be stupid like I was. :)
You should've consulted with Fred and the rest of the gang first. C'mon Scoob.
I wish I could blame scooby snacks or some fine beverage, but it was my own stupidity on this one. I don't think I even could have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for those darned kids.
Have you tried checking with a moderator in the trollbox? They might not get it fixed, but they might give you an update as to your status.
Also, very sorry. I once sent 6 steem to @nep instead of @nepd and I felt terrible. Can't imagine the loss of 3k steem. Best of luck!
Oh, bummers. Yeah, getting the account name wrong is a whole order of magnitude worse.
Yep. I tend to triple check things now :)
Something similar happen to me too instead of Klye i send it to kyle 😒