Stolen Crypto
TLDR — I had some, then I didn’t
A warning to the weary and a cautionary tale
Cast your mind back to March 2020. Most countries were in lockdown and many people, including me, had time on our hands. We had given up social lives to protect the infirm, the elderly and ourselves from an invisible enemy.
At this time, I got back into gaming, and reliving some of my youth playing the latest version of Doom. With some of the cash I’d save being a hermit I purchased and built a gaming machine and as a part of this, I added a RTX 3070 and quickly realised the combination of cheap(er) electricity and a powerful graphics card could be used to mine crypto. I opted for Etherium.
Etherium is now a proof of stake currency [PoS] (as opposed to proof of work [PoW] that Bitcoin and many others), however at the time the Etherium was still proof of work, thus I could put my card to work and make some money in the process. I only played for about 30 minutes so the remaining 23.5 hours would be well used in mining.
I did some calculations and guessed that I would net out at about £7 per day better off — this did tail off to about £2 by the end of lockdown (as the diffaculty increased) but resulted in a pot of about £1500 worth of etherium by the end of lockdown less a guessed ammount of £500 in electricity leaving me with £1000 profit. Ace!
I left it there. forgot about it and got on with my life. PoW had moved to PoS and I did have a day job and lockdown was behind us.
I then signed up for a crypto rewards credit card that was offering pretty good incentives to stake in their currency. I swapped my Eth for thier crypto and as if by magic was getting a healthy $% cashback on my spending for staking with their currency.
this worked out pretty well for about 12 months when out of the blue I was sent an email to say my status on my crypto card was downgraded… eh?
I looked at my wallet and sure enough, it was all gone. The 0.6539 eth that I had minded were gone. What to do. This is where reality bites. If you have a conventional bank account you can call the bank and at least speak to someone. They might not help but at least you have a point of contact and a way to escilate.
Crypto is not the same — yes there are exchanges that offer some of these protections (allegedly but there have been too many cases where exchanges disappear or go bust as with FTX) but if you go vanilla, as I did you have your nn words and your wallet.