Hello Steemians, I am not a robot.

The market is doing what the market does and I can’t find any new crypto anecdotes, so here is a crypto anecdote.

Today I finished entering all XRB related transactions into my books. The whole sordid tale lay out before me and I decided to finally start writing shit down. So.

Part 1: Welcome to BitGrail

Projects that were completely different tech to BitCoin have always snagged my attention. I’d bought ByteBall via the chatbot in early April 2017 and it was the coolest thing.

At the time I earmarked two other DAG related projects, Iota and XRB.

Around the middle of the year I was on the train heading for work and noticed that XRB had pumped hard to around 7k satoshis.

It was coming back to earth, down to about 3k at the time. 

XRB was a distinctly different project and I got the prick of FOMO.

I signed up for BitGrail on the train. It was a truly awful process but I got it done and sent some BTC over.

I remember being a bit surprised at how awful the signup / signon process with BitGrail was. Hah!

Once at work I exchanged the BTC for XRB straight off the book. (My motto is: Quit fucking around, get that shit done!)

XRB slowly kept going down for a month and went to the back of my mind. 

There was a bit of movement in August but not enough to be worth logging into the shithole that BitGrail was for.

Yes, yes, I know, stupid, stupid, NEVER LEAVE YOUR SHIT ON EXCHANGES, ESPECIALLY AWFUL ITALIAN ONES!

I had never even looked at the Wallet at this point. I didn’t until December.

Part 2: The market notices XRB

I’m still not clear why XRB took off… the news about the end of the distribution and burn finally lit the right fuses I guess.

By the 10th of December volumes spiked massively and a new all-time high smashed through.

But this was nothing but a tremble of what was about to happen.

By January XRB would go as high as 0.0026

I had bought in at around 3k at the end of June. 

Mid December I took back my investment. This would be the one and only time withdrawing from BitGrail was easy.

Part 3: The shitstorm descends

Then something finally slapped me into doing something. The exchange completely shat itself.

When it came back online it was possible to withdraw only a maximum 0.5 BTC every 24 hours.

I immediately began to withdraw the maximum possible amount every day.

At first I withdrew both BTC and XRB. But as the situation began to look more flaky by the day I focussed on getting as much BTC out as possible.

For the next couple of weeks days I studiously withdrew 0.5 BTC every day. This was torture.

I got out very decent sums of XRB and BTC by the time withdrawals were closed for good. All in all, not bad. No matter what happened at this point I was miles ahead.

The option of sending personal info to BitGrail to get “verified” began looking good compared to how bad the rest of the situation felt. 

I took the selfies and everything. I was THHHIIISSS close to sending those tremendous douchebags my personal info.

Thank fuck I’m lazy and paranoid.

Though I knew my remaining funds were in a fucked position. 

I almost wrote the funds off at that point… But something wouldn’t let me remove the values from my spreadsheet.

Then the unexpected happened.

BitGrail offered a function to terminate your account as long as you accept that your XRB would be sold for BTC and the reminder of your balance would be sent to you in BTC.

This sent the price dumping hard as everyone ran for the only exit available.

I immediately sold my remaining XRB for BTC, took screen shots and text scrapes of the transaction history then requested termination.

Magically, the balance landed in my BTC wallet a few days later.

I was 100% out!! I still can barely believe it.

Either I’m very lucky or I just managed to make exactly the right moves to extract myself from a totally fucked up situation.

The fact that so many others like me actually did get out almost everything makes me believe that BitGrail may really have been trying to do the right thing.

And they really didn’t know how fucked they were, how awful their code was and how badly they were about to fuck their users.

Finally BitGrail admitted that they’d lost three quarters of their user’s XRB. Most of the funds still on the exchange are likely to be tied up in legal proceedings for years.

The icing on the cake was them requesting that the Nano team fork the ledger to restore the funds. Ridiculous.

Epilogue

Undoubtedly some lost everything, including their own lives. 

This debacle demonstrates exactly why crypto rule #1 MUST BE RESPECTED.

Despite all the bullshit I’d managed to trade to a BTC profit of 2,133%. 

BTC was around $2,500 when I bought in. Today it is $9,500.

That’s profit of 8,104% in USD. I’ll take an 81x for doing practically nothing for 7 months any day of the week!

First thing I did was purchase most of my Nano bag back on Binance and send it to my wallet.

In my opinion it’s a great project with a huge future ahead.