I lost $2.5m with Bitcoin

If you know about what’s happened with Bitcoin recently, then you know where it’s likely I went wrong. I put my life savings into BTC and was riding high. Two years ago, I was worth nearly $3m, a year ago, I was still well into the millionaire range. On paper, it looked amazing. I was looking at ways to acquire more BTC, put more into this wonderful investment.

A smart, careful investor

I thought I was careful. I put most of it into cold storage, and the had only 10% of it exposed to exchanges. I only deposited some to earn interest on it. The interest was great, then good, then mediocre. I started pulling out most of it into cold storage. I was doing the smart thing. I pulled all of my BTC from Celsius. They had their own token and that made me suspicious. I was smart. I was smarter than many.

Thinking I was so smart, I also decided I should borrow against my BTC to fund some acquisitions. In particular, I wanted to gift my wife a new ring. So I put 1.5 BTC into BlockFi to get a loan. The interest rate was low and assuming BTC would rise on average, I could reduce my collateral year over year. If BTC went down too much, the amount loan was something I could pay off within 6 months or so, just by saving in cash instead of buying more BTC. Again, this would have been absolutely ok. None of the events that followed would have…