Cautionary tale on how to get coins stolen

Recently I found some Bitcoin SV in my Coinbase account. I decided to retrieve them and convert them to BTC. All I managed to do was get them stolen. Here is what happened.

Log of events leading to my stupid loss of Bitcoin SV coins.

1. I discovered the Bitcoin SV in my Coinbase account. The only option they provided for this coin was to send it somewhere.
2. I wanted to convert the coins to BTC in my blockchain.com account. But they don't support BSV.
3. I found a site, changenow, that would convert the coins.
4. Foolishly, I did not test the site. When it asked for the receiving address, I apparently entered blockchains address. The coins were sent directly to blockchain.com without converting to BTC.
5. Since blockchain.com doesn't handle BSV, they never received them. The coins were in limbo on the Blockchain SV transaction chain.
6. I searched the internet trying to find a solution to this problem. I could not find a simple solution.
7. I contacted blockchain.com, describing the problem. Their customer support responded with a description of the situation and several suggestions. Their response was excellent.
8. Based on one of their suggestions, I decided to use a desktop wallet that supported Bitcoin SV. By creating the wallet with the 12 secret words from my blockchain.com wallet, I hoped the desktop wallet would retrieve the coins.
9. Recognizing the risk, I basically emptied my blockchain.com wallet.
10. Since I had used Electrum, I decided to use their SV wallet.
11. I found it, downloaded Electrum-BSV-4.0.4.exe, installed it. and elected to create the wallet by importing the Bitcoin SV secret words.
12. After I entered the 12 words, the program failed to connect to the internet, so I tried again, and it failed again.
13. I moved on to atomcwallet.exe. The wallet it created had its own 12 words, so I restored a wallet with the 12 words. My coins did not appear so once again I moved on.
14. My next choice was Exodus on my Windows 10 computer.
15. I created my wallets using the 12 words from my blockchain.com account. Effectively I created a clone of that account. I entered the words manually.
16. I did a refresh in Exodus and the BSV coins appeared.
17. Exodus has an exchange feature where you can convert one coin for another. There is a fee for this.
18. Since I had pretty much emptied my blockchain.com before starting the process, I didn't have enough to cover the exchange fee.
19. I transferred a small amount of BTC from Coinbase to cover the fee.
20. I used the program to exchange the BSV for BTC. The exchange was going to take a while, so I closed the program.
21. When I returned a few hours later I could see that the exchange had occurred, but the BTC had been sent somewhere.
22. I was confused and ultimately contacted the Exodus support team.
23. A few hours later the rest of my BTC disappeared.

I worked for a while with the Exodus support team. Despite their excellent support, ultimately the coins were stolen in step 12 and not recoverable.

I made two mistakes as indicated in steps 4 and 12. In step 4, I should have tested the conversion with a small amount so I would understand the process. Had I done so, none of the rest would have been necessary. In step 12, I did not find the real Electrum SV product, but one apparently designed to steal your coins.

Ultimately, I did find an excellent desktop wallet, Exodus, with a great support team. I'll be using them in the future. I also learned more about crypto currencies and blockchain during the process. It's too bad the tuition was so dammed high.

If you care to comment, contact me at ole44bill@gmail.com.

Minor adjustment and decision time

The next step in the Bollinger Band simulations is to look at recent BTC prices attempting to identify recent market trends. Adding a 3^rd variable to step through isn’t overly complicated. But coming up with a way to measure the results is. It’s going to require looking at each transaction and building a ledger to compute profit or loss on each sale then summing over all transactions. This will also require a minor adjustment. In past simulations, we’ve started by splitting our $10,000 stake equally between cash and coins. Since each sell transaction will have to match a previous buy, we’ll have to start with zero coins and all cash. All $10,000 will initially be allocated to cash.

The decision has to do with continuing this topic on the blog. One of the primary reasons for including bitcoin analysis was to generate some discussion (questions, ideas, suggestions, etc.). It has not happened. In fact, I don’t detect any interest in the blog or the files that I offer to share. So, it doesn’t make sense for me to take time away from actual analysis to continue posting. Therefore, I’m going to cease and spend my time in analysis. If you wish to comment or continue a discussion, contact me at ole44bill@gmail.com.

Bollinger Bands #6 Market direction impact

To see what the impact of the market trend has on the Bollinger Band model we can look at the results of 2018 and 2019. Bitcoin started 2018 started with a BTC price of $13,850 and ended at $3,747. It dropped rapidly early and was generally had a downward move. In 2019 it started at $3,747 and was at $8,327 on September 30^th. Before running the simulation for each year separately, we narrowed the parameters ranges. We used 7 to 16 days and standard deviation multipliers of 1.7, 1.9, and 2.1. Following are the top 10 combinations from each year (2018 on left, 2019 on right).

Net Worth	Days Desired	Std Dev Multiplier	#Trades	# Buys	# Sells		Net Worth	Days Desired	Std Dev Multiplier	#Trades	# Buys	# Sells
$6,716	15	1.9	111	60	51		$13,764	7	2.1	98	49	49
$6,548	14	1.7	134	72	62		$13,379	7	1.7	124	62	62
$6,547	13	1.7	140	74	66		$12,861	7	1.9	110	55	55
$6,352	15	1.7	126	67	59		$12,714	8	2.1	90	44	46
$6,323	14	1.9	109	59	50		$12,424	9	1.7	111	55	56
$6,190	12	1.7	137	72	65		$12,393	8	1.9	100	49	51
$6,054	14	2.1	95	52	43		$12,364	11	1.7	97	48	49
$6,050	16	1.9	107	57	50		$12,330	10	1.7	103	51	52
$6,008	16	2.1	89	49	40		$12,223	8	1.7	112	55	57
$5,997	16	1.7	125	65	60		$12,153	16	1.7	78	38	40

The top net worth combination of Bollinger Bands parameters was quite different for the 2 years. The 2018 (downward trend) parameters were closer to the combinations for the 2 years together. That makes sense because the BTC price on September 30^th, 2019 was lower than the opening price on January 1^st, 2018.

Unfortunately, the only profitable combination occurred in a rising market. Furthermore, a buy and hold strategy in 2019 would have a net profit of $12,223. That’s going to be a hard number to beat. But we have one more idea. We’re going to use some of the previous day’s prices and use both linear and quadratic regression to identify a recent trend. This will add a 3^rd parameter and complicate things.

This might take a while. I’ll use Twitter, @billlanke, to indicate when I post some results.