Ask yourself what youd do if your investment paid off tenfold, only to disappear in a fire.
Frauenfelder got into this jam by trying to be safe.
The rig was locked by a string of 21 words and a seven-digit PIN.
Frauenfelder wrote the words on a piece of paper, which his cleaning service threw out.
He memorized his PIN, but then forgot it.
Recovering his money was so stressful, just reading about it drained the blood from my face.
You might think that you wont make such a mistake!
But you might keep your PIN and code somewheretooaccessible.
Thats assuming you would have even bought a fancy secure USB machine and not just a typical flash drive.
Its also assuming youd never just lose the unit.
Or leave the bitcoin on your rig, and then getthathacked.
Or maybe you wouldnt keep your bitcoin on your box at all, but in an online exchange.
Except I bought my bitcoin on the trading site Mt.
Calculating that $300,000 just now was… not fun.
Its painful to realize that I lost a life-changing pile of money.
Maybe I shouldnt have trusted my cryptocurrency to a site that began as a card-trading forumMt.
Gox originally stood for Magic: the Gathering Online Exchange.
Managing your bitcoin takes a lot of research and work.
Even then, there is no foolproof way to hold onto your bitcoin.
Every way to store it brings some security risk.
So does every way to store traditional money!
All of these break down, too, sometimes, which is part of the appeal of alternative currencies.
But the safeguards around cryptocurrency, still new and unfamiliar, break downconstantly.
He only got his money back because it was still, eventually, insecure.
If youre ready for that kind of risk, go for it!
But for now, dont put in what youre not ready to lose.
Investing in cryptocurrency is fun and interesting.
But while its systems are still so new and poorly understood, cryptocurrency is an insanely high-risk currency.
