Back in 2013 when I bought my first bitcoin, I had the vision that the other crypto currencies would eventually also experience some amazing gains so I looked into Litecoin and started researching how to get some. I found out about this website that would exchange bitcoin for litecoin but it was in Russia. I felt very trusting of the crypto community since I was a newbie at the time so this was no big deal for me. In fact, I felt that most people would be a bit skeptical about something like this so I could possibly profit by making this move that many others would not do. It was very easy to open an account there, transfer some bitcoin in and make the trade. I ended up with a couple hundred litecoin- at the time they had blasted up to $22 and bitcoin was around $900( on its way down from the $1200 peak, which is when I first learned about bitcoin and bought in).
Within a few months, both bitcoin and litecoin dipped down to some really low prices which caused me to lose interest in crypto for the time being. I held my accounts and rarely logged in, at the time I thought that holding my coin in an exchange was keeping it in a wallet. I thought they were one in the same. Although the prices of btc and ltc went all the way down to around $200 and $2, I was optimistic that they would both eventually bounce back. I bought a few more btc at that time but waited another year or two before they started to climb again.
Last year, I decided to trade some btc and pick up some more litecoin when it was at $4 on btc-e. A few months later, I decided to trade more btc into some of these other obscure cryptos that BTC-E had available. Without even researching what these cryptos were, I traded a few hundred $ of btc into each of the currencies. There was one called Ether, which I picked up for $7, Dash around the same, Doge, Novacoin, Peercoin, Namecoin all for pennies.
Once coinbase picked up Ether, I had a feeling that it would explode. I told my boss about it and he picked up 10 eth for about $10 each- $100 total investment. This revitalized my interest in cryptos because after the few years of waiting out the lows, the crypto world was finally expanding and making headlines. It only took a few months for Ether to make some crazy gains and then everything else caught on and my whole combined crypto portfolio ballooned into a value of probably over $40k. Right at the time ETH was at its peak of around $400, my boss cashed out. His $100 turned into $3850!! I kept holding:(
Since everything was down from the June/July peak, I decided it was time to move some of my holdings around and start making more trades on the exchanges that had more cryptos to offer, after all just about every trade I had made so far really paid off so I felt I should be able to make some more smart trades and grow this thing even bigger. In the back of my mind, I also started to worry a bit about my BTC-E account which had grown into my highest valued account thanks mainly to eth and dash. The whole bs narrative about Russian hackers tampering with the election got me worried that there may be some crack down by the US govt on Americans using Russian sites. It was time to liquidate that account!
I went to log in and couldn't easily find my password so I just decided to reset it. Well it turns out that on BTC-E when you changed your password, you couldn't withdraw funds for 48 hours.(it's a shame that I had to use past tense here!) Since I couldn't withdraw, I was still able to trade so I decided to turn 6 eth into 30 ltc- which ended up being a good move. I should have made the trade for a larger amount but apparently it wouldn't have mattered anyway. The next day, I went to log in and the screen of death showed up! I figured that it was just some routine maintenance or had to do with the upcoming fork and that it might be back up in a few hours. I googled btc-e and no recent news showed up yet. The next day, the same thing happened but when I googled it I heard about the arrest, more articles, blogs and post started to surface and I got that feeling when your head starts to spin, your vision goes fuzzy, your heart starts racing and you get a bad feeling in the pit of your stomach!
I have been trying to be optimistic that maybe they are just waiting until the Aug 1 fork to re-open but the more posts and articles I read, the more fearful I become that I will never see those coins again (currently valued at over $20k). Now that I heard that the US dept of justice might have taken control of BTC-E, most of my hope is gone although a lot of these articles and posts are pure speculation at this point (how can the US take control of something based in Russia?). I can't believe how close I got to saving it all by attempting to pull it out the DAY BEFORE and that the password change screwed me! I also wonder how many people this has effected and how much crypto they have all lost.
If I never recoup what I was holding in BTC-E, at least I still have some in other exchanges that I play with and hopefully can make some great trades like I made in the past few years on btc-e with litecoin/eth/dash when they cheap! Although, this is a tough situation to accept, I am optimistic about using what I have left to trade and invest into positions that will eventually get me back to where I was in terms of crypto net worth.
One of my friends got me into Bitconnect and Control-Finance the other day in order to take my mind off the btc-e debacle . He told me not to worry and to look at the compound interest charts. It looks like I can make the money back in the next year
or two through these sites alone! So far I have made about $100 total in the past few days on those sites just by transferring a small amount of btc to them. If you want to capitalize on this opportunity and also help me out by joining under my code, please do so. Also if you feel sorry for my situation, even though I was the stupid one who kept my coin on the exchanges, and you feel like donating to me, please do so below!
Control-Finance(make interest on your deposit every day! great referral program too!)
https://control-finance.com/?ref=BitLender
BitConnect (daily interest based on auto bot's trading profits! earn $$ on referrals!) https://bitconnect.co/?ref=BitLender
donate:
bitcoin: 3LiaQXkuMJWJ6LLFNK2aVp8DrSNYQauf5m
litecoin: LRHxUjDU3ouek2WwMtt1zRKBq865UeH7LM
dash: XxY6EydcaQKNaPAxN152pEBwhUFgvVnPGw
ether: 0x554FdD3fdf23e1798d8665CDC9A81dB86f78Ee64
monero: 4GdoN7NCTi8a5gZug7PrwZNKjvHFmKeV11L6pNJPgj5QNEHsN6eeX3DaAQFwZ1ufD4LYCZKArktt113W7QjWvQ7CWFR5Wh7AxEH4beM5QK
gnosis: 0xe3af4087cfc68fa97785cff7da630da2ddb91fbc
zcash: t1SAyAifW4WRUzsKFirkiVjjXxUhXwNdjzp
Could this be a backup site?
https://steemit.com/new/@bigthangz/anyone-try-btc-e-ru
Thanks for commenting. I am not sure. I will wait for someone to try!
OK. Posted on reddit and got a few comments, one person tried to use it to reset his password and it didn't show that his account was linked on the new site - btc-e.nz is also another domain location