How to ruin your credit, declare bankruptcy and lose your family’s entire retirement nest egg in one easy step: Bitcoins!
Ohh boy, sometimes the best things happen outside of the insanity that is the BitcoinTalk forums. Today we’re looking at a very bad and very sad post over on Reddit. Some chump has decided the best course to secure his entire family’s future was to put his entire retirement savings into Bitcoins.
Read this part again and let it sink in how horrible an idea this is:
I am not a wealthy man. I am actually quite poor and have a lot of student loan debt. But I have good credit. I have applied for, and received over $30,000 USD in credit card 0% balance transfer cash, which I have slowly been investing in bitcoin for the past two months. I started when it was $14/BTC. At this second, it is $25.10/BTC. I have invested some of it in satoshidice, and the rest will be stored in an offline wallet.
He’s borrowing from his credit cards in order to “invest” some BTC into an online casino and some into a regular wallet file, hoping the currency increases in value forever.
You have to read the entire post to get the full extent of the tragedy here. It’s not some college kid who got too much credit. This guy is not young, he has a family, and he’s already in debt. He has not only bet everything his family has and more on Bitcoin, but he’s also of the mindset that whatever he put into SatoshiDice is an “investment”.
Some people on Reddit have expressed their concerns over his plan. He promptly waives off all their concerns because since it’s on a credit card, it’s not his money so it’s “not his problem”.
Plenty of people agree with him.
And what happens if the credit card companies won’t be so nice to him? Well, exactly what any true libertarian would say: the government will bail me out!
February 18, 2013 @ 1:32 am
You can own shares of SatoshiDice… I think that’s what he meant by investing in SatoshiDice.
March 4, 2013 @ 11:09 am
What an idiot. First he is putting all his eggs in 1 basket you are supposed to diversify. Second he isnt going to make money with the interest rate his credit card lets say bitcoins go up 20% per year and his credit card charges him 30% he will lose $3000. Its not an inherent fault of bitcoins though. He is just being a dumbass. Give a dumbass 30k and the stock market he will lose his money. They have a television show where dumbasses win the lottery and spend 500 million dollars in 2 years and are homeless there after.
March 22, 2013 @ 1:36 pm
To be honest, as long as he has borrowed relatively small amounts (low 1000s of $) on multiple credit cards the worst that he can expect if he defaults is a shitty credit record (i.e. no more loans, credit cards, mortgages etc. for a long time, not too familiar with the US market but I wouldn’t expect the records to be kept more than a decade). If he doesn’t earn a lot it’s unlikely it’ll be cost effective to go after a chunk of his salary.
As long as he doesn’t start sending good money after bad (blowing his savings or re-mortgaging his house or something) he’s not going to end up on the streets.
February 16, 2014 @ 8:09 pm
It’s been a year, and the guy said he was thinking of doing a full write-up…..and has chosen not to, citing a desire to retain his privacy and claiming that he’s “not an attention whore.” Which is a fucking crock of shit, because if he didn’t want to draw attention to himself, he shouldn’t have made the initial post to begin with. He admits to having made some ‘costly mistakes’, though – my guess is he just doesn’t want to admit to the internet just how badly he got burned by his own stupidity.
October 16, 2014 @ 3:08 am
The replies to one of his follow-up posts say he’s at least cashed out the principal of what he invested.