Crypto-currency is is like swimming with sharks. Except for a small cachet of hardcore libertarians and tinfoilers the people using it are shady characters.
I'd have to agree. A couple of years back I spent a good amount of time delving into the bitcon world. I had a number of miners running in my basement, I bought a few bitcoin - etc.
Shady characters: Yes, absolutely. I had problems both times I tried to buy bitcoin. One guy took the money thru Paypal - and then refused to send me the bitcoin. I knew he had the money , so the next day I got on his ass and hooked up with Paypal and they ended up giving me the money back. Happened one more time too. Reading thru crypto-currency forums I saw copious threads about all sorts of bullshit going on.
The next big problem I had was with Coinbase. Coinbase is like a Paypal for bitcoin. Well one Sunday around lunch time I get emails indicating that I had just bought three bitcoin thru Coinbase. Umm - no , I did not. I immediately got into my Coinbase account - and saw that somebody was logged on from the Netherlands. Directly after that I contacted Coinbase and told them somebody had hacked my account. Their basic response was: tough shit. They used all sorts of excuses about 3 factor security and all that crap - but the truth of the matter was their security absolutely sucked. They got hacked - and somebody got my account information - and then used it. I went immediately to my bank the next morning (Coinbase had to be connected directly to a bank account - same as PayPal) - and had them shut down the ability for Coinbase to withdraw the money. It took a few days - but I started getting contacted by their legal dept. demanding I pay up. I went back and forth with them for about a week and then finally sent one final letter to both their customer service and their legal dept. and told them to
**** off - in those exact words.
As a reference point - I have used Paypal almost since Paypal was invented and I have NEVER had a hack problem with them. Coinbase tried to claim it was my fault - no - it was YOUR fault. The major clue was that they allowed simultaneous logins from two different continents. Yeah right - that's a feature - not a bug. A-holes.
So Coinbase took a $1500 or so screw job because they're a pack of morons. Sucks to be stupid.
Shortly after that - the combination of constantly fighting fires - combined with the fact that the mining just didn't seem like it was worth the trouble financially - made me close up shop. I dumped everything and have not touched Shitcoin since then.
Recently I read that Bitcoin was up in the $4k range - if I had held onto the coinage I had back then - I would have made a very sweet little profit. But hindsight is 20/20 - and at the time it looked like a completely shitty deal to stay in it.
I have to say - the mining rig company I dealt with in China - was great. Easy transactions , always shipped quickly and their products worked with no problems. Pretty much everything else involved with Shitcoin though - was a suck job.
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