Notorious goldbug and Bitcoin critic Peter Schiff just fell victim to one of the classic crypto blunders - the most famous of which is "not your keys, not your crypto" - but only slightly less well-known is this:
Always back up your wallet and keys in a safe place.
All Princess Bride references aside, according to Schiff's tweet, his mobile wallet became corrupted and is no longer recognizing his password.
Rather than ask for help, Schiff blamed Bitcoin for the wallet's corruption and his own failure to take even the most basic of precautions.
"So now not only is my Bitcoin intrinsically worthless; it has no market value either. I knew owning Bitcoin was a bad idea, I just never realized it was this bad!"
Don't get me wrong - it's not like I haven't screwed up and lost crypto. I once lost 4 bitcoins when I did a system rollback of my computer to fix some performance issues. It didn't occur to me until the moment I clicked the button to start the rollback that my wallet files would be among those deleted.
The only difference - aside from the fact that I inevitably felt the pinch of that loss more than Schiff has - is that I didn't blame Bitcoin for the loss. It was my own failure to take backup measures that rendered me incapable of recovering my BTC.
It stung, but I learned the lesson.
A Gift Ungraciously Received
Back in July 2019, Bitcoin proponent Anthony "Pomp" Pompliano outed Schiff as a BTC "hodler" on Twitter, to which the Bitcoin hater admitted he'd been given $100 worth of the cryptocurrency as a gift.
The admission prompted others within the crypto community to gift Schiff with some additional Bitcoin and by the next day, the balance in his wallet address had swelled to 0.124 BTC - worth approximately $1350 at the time.
Most people, on receiving such a gift, would be appreciative and use the opportunity to educate themselves. Not Schiff - he is convinced he already knows everything there is to know about Bitcoin.
Though he did thank the community for their gifts, his graciousness was dampened when he snidely commented, "I guess I'll have to hodl it and go down with the ship."
I have to give Schiff credit for one thing, though - at least he's consistent. Schiff has been calling Bitcoin a bubble and predicting its demise for years and his rhetoric has never changed, regardless of how well the market is doing.
Currently, Schiff's wallet contains just over $1800 in Bitcoin.
Like this article? Come follow me on Twitter - @Bitcoin_Mafia - for more content and commentary.
He is consistently wrong.
True enough
Fucking hilarious. Also some of the replies to his tweet... People are dumb.
Great story, welcome back on Steem!
Thanks :)
4.97 USD worth of bitcoin has been spent to promote this content using Steemium .
Learn more here!
https://www.whatismyreferer.com/
Congratulations @bitcoinmafia! You have completed the following achievement on the Steem blockchain and have been rewarded with new badge(s) :
You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking
If you no longer want to receive notifications, reply to this comment with the word
STOPTo support your work, I also upvoted your post!
Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!
As bad as it is for anyone, and despite his opinions about it, what occured have served well to the purpose of educating (or remembering) others about the importance of managing our keys properly. I'm starting to learn about cryptocurrency myself, and it's good to have people like you pointing out the pausible mistakes we could engage.
For sure, losing private keys is harsh and sadly a risk in today's cryptocurrency world. Whether it will be the same in a few years, I highly doubt that, at least for the main public. This obviously will come with more restrictions, but that's something we've got to live with: you want more security & privacy? Do it yourself. You want less risks? Let someone/something do it for you.
However, my guess is that Peter didn't give a f*anyway, when he first got those tiny amounts of BTC (seemingly around 50$~). This is pretty much part of his gold-agenda, IMO.
I mean yeah it's easy to blame him for his loss but I want to quote Vitalik Buterin:
"Disappointed at people replying to this with "crypto is what it is, it's your job to be super-careful and write down backup seeds in three places". We can and should create better wallet tech to make security easier."
My issue isn't so much that he lost his bitcoins - like I said, I lost 4 of them once - my issue is that he blames Bitcoin for him losing his BTC.
Congratulations @bitcoinmafia!
Your post was mentioned in the Steem Hit Parade in the following category:
Great article!
..ya, welcome in the future...there are always two sides of the medal..anyway, up..follow you..resteemed..