5 Mistakes I've Made So You Don't Have To

While mistakes may be overrated, that doesn't mean you shouldn't learn from them. And you're much better off if you can learn from the mistakes I have made, rather than having to make them yourself.

As such, I wanted to share 5 of my most costly mistakes during my years at /CryptoCurrency.

1. Keep your SEED phrase safe. No, I wasn't scammed. I had given my SEED phrase to my parents and parent-in-law on a piece of paper. Both 12 words. When my parents moved last year, they cleaned up and threw away that 'piece of paper'. Cost: $150,- for a CryptoSteel to keep my new SEED safe and $300 in transaction costs to move all my ERC20 tokens.
2. Don't do margin trading (if you don't understand it). At the end of 2017, I had made enough money to buy a car. Sold $10.000 on Kraken for FIAT and decided to open a leveraged trade with the remaining $1000 in BTC. Little did I know that Kraken uses your whole balance as leverage. Bitcoin went down and I lost all my FIAT. Cost: $11.000 Don't do margin trading if you don't understand what you're doing. I thought only my $1000 was at risk.
3. Don't get greedy. After a while of increases, Bitcoin and Ethereum just don't go fast enough anymore. I started with $250 which turned into $10.000 but suddenly that isn't enough. You start looking for the next 'moonshot' to turn that $10.000 into $1 million. Don't. I've invested $5.000 into 'Xtrabytes', which turned into $50.000, which went down 99,8% after the bull run ended. It left me with less money than I put into it and certainly less than if I had invested in BTC/ETH. Only gamble with a small portion of your funds. Cost: $5.000 - $50.000
4. Don't trust shitcoin exchanges. Never leave more on a shitcoin exchange then needed. Due to exit scams (Coinsmarkets), hacks (Cryptopia) or lack of mandatory chain updates (Yobit). Cost: I've lost ten thousands of $ based on the current prices. Where possible, protect your own holdings.
5. OpenSea.io only charges a large registration fee once. This one is recent (yesterday). I decided to sell CryptoCrystals on OpenSea.io. I wanted to sell a single crystal to try the system, but the transaction fee was $100. As a result, I decided to bundle 4 crystals together in a cheap package and sell them all at once to limit transaction fees. Directly after selling them, the price went from 0.1 ETH each to 0.4 ETH floor price. Turns out the $100,- is a one time registration fee. I could have easily sold them one by one during the day, since the following transaction fees are much more reasonable. Cost: 1.2 ETH.

Adding up the cost of all my mistakes, I have lost more money on stupidity than I have left invested in crypto. It's a new space and I still have more to learn. Thanks for all the advice everyone has given me thus far and I hope my mistakes will in turn help others be successful.