It was once said, a dumb person doesn’t learn from their mistakes, a smart person learns from their mistakes, and a genius learns from other people’s mistakes. This age-old saying rings ever true in the crypto market. Nobody’s perfect, and your Bitcoin mistakes can end up costing you big time. There are no refunds or take-backs on the BTC blockchain.
Everyone makes mistakes. In terms of cryptocurrency, they can range greatly in their repercussions. In many instances, a Bitcoin mistake is small enough to recover from, but that’s not always the case. As you’re about to learn, even a small typo can end up costing millions of dollars when you’re dealing with BTC. Here are seven of the biggest Bitcoin mistakes ever made.
Mt. Gox Incidents
The now infamous Mt. Gox story reflects the importance of working with a team of accomplished developers on your project. Initially, Mark Karpeles saw great success working as the only developer for what had grown into the largest BTC exchange in the world. Unfortunately for him, his luck quickly changed after a hacker was able to infiltrate the auditing system of the exchange and slash the price of BTC down to pennies. Consequently, the price of BTC plummeted for months following this incident.
That same year saw the demise of Mt. Gox but not until after it was revealed that another mysterious hacker reportedly made off with $340 million in BTC. The shadowy intruder had been siphoning crypto from the platform, unnoticed, for years. To make matters even worse, the Mt. Gox system interpreted the hack as deposits. This caused the system to then begin crediting individuals with free crypto. One wallet received 40,000 in extra BTC. Ultimately, there was a total of 850,000 BTC lost in the incidents, which resulted in the bankruptcy of the exchange.
Mt. Gox from the Grave
It turns out that the ghost of Mt. Gox wasn’t done plaguing the market, and, in 2014, Mt. Gox struck again. This incident was far more innocent but still resulted in major losses for one individual. The losses occurred when an unknown crypto investor accidentally sent 800 BTC to the exchange’s wallet. In a heartfelt Reddit post the individual explains:
