Excellent write up @makowrites, I did a similar one myself months ago, however mine was more based around the first point you make in this article.
I have tried telling people time and time again, you cannot predict the future price of crypto by looking at a chart. This is because, a) the chart represents a bunch of speculation, and b) there are no real world indicators that caused the chart to create that shape.
There are many people on Steemit who publish their chart data along with a load of nonsense about Elliot Waves and blah, blah, blah.
Some of these people are deliberately trying to pull the wool over your eyes, however most are simply delusional and have not realised that the human's ability to spot patterns among chaos is seriously affecting their judgement.
Even in the stock market those charts are questionable. What's the first thing any financial adviser in any (regulated) country have to tell you by law?
Past performance is no indication of future performance
The reason this is law, is because the law realises that humans look for (and find) patterns everywhere. They then place a meaning on top of that pattern. It is why we have religion and superstition such as numerology and astrology.
I like the other points you make as well, and like you say 99.999999% of cryptos have no use case. This is what makes Steem different, so hopefully we see more and more use cases.
Steemit is the first, however games like Steemmonsters excite me, even though you don't have to buy in Steem, you are rewarded by it, and need to be on the blockchain to take part in the competitions.
The more use cases that pop up for Steem, the more people who'll use it until one day, boom!
As far as similar losses, yes, I like everyone have suffered badly. In some ways it's not so bad because I invested profits from the BTC and SBD pumps, so it's not like my bottom line was affected, however I did want to see those profits grow rather than disappear.
Verge was a big one for me, I bought at between 700-900 Sats, and lost about 75% of that. Though I'm hanging onto those because of their partnership with Pornhub, which could turn out to be the ultimate use case!
I got burned in Z-Classic as well, bought a couple at around $150, sold one for $135 and the other is now sitting at around $4.
Got pounded by XEM, I put thousands into that. Everything was going to plan, and then that exchange got hacked and all of their XEM was stolen. So I bought in at $0.18 all the way up to $1.00, it got hacked around $1.20 and is currently sitting at $0.09.
I sold for massive losses and moved it to Electronium instead.
Oh well, I've just read the tea leaves and they say that 2019 is going to be the biggest bull run ever! 🤣😂🤣
RE: An $800 Mistake