How to lose money on cryptocurrencies

The summary of the whole story is as follows: DinoDealer sold his copy of the EtherRock collection for 444 Wei, or just over one cent instead of 444 ETH, which is almost $1.2 million. On his Twitter feed, the NFT enthusiast noted that almost “all of his capital” was wiped out with just one click of the mouse.

How’s your week going? Mine? I just put EtherRock #44 up for sale for 444 Wei instead of 444 ETH. The transaction was done almost instantly, NFT bought the bot and immediately resold it for 234 ETH. In just one click, my entire fortune worth over $1 million is gone. Is there any hope? Can the “snipers” take pity on me?


Recall, 1 gwei = 0.000000001 ETH. At the same time, 1 gwei = 1 000 000 000 wei. In other words, a trading platform user accidentally sold his valuable NFT token for a few pennies.

Lost EtherRock

Snipers in this context are bots that have been used on auction-based trading platforms for quite some time. They were widely used after the appearance of eBay. Such a program allows the user to quickly buy the desired item, if its price is for some reason below the market price. This is exactly what happened with DinoDealer.

Most interestingly, the creation of such a bot does not require any extraordinary skills. For example, the freelancing platform Upwork constantly places orders for the creation of sniper bots targeted specifically at the NFT platform OpenSea. According to the Cointelegraph news outlet, the average cost of such work is measured in hundreds of dollars.

Ads on Upwork for bot creation

Read also: Mark Zuckerberg has hinted at the arrival of NFT tokens on Instagram. Why it matters.

Once a bot buys an NFT, there’s no ‘way back’ anymore. As a reminder, blockchain transactions cannot be undone, so conducting a transaction with a unique token on OpenSea also cannot be “challenged”. However, the platform itself has previously had problems with the cancellation mechanism of previously tendered NFTs, due to which some attentive coin enthusiasts were able to make a fortune on the resale of tokens. We also know that OpenSea management later acknowledged the problem and compensated the NFT owners who suffered losses.

Indeed, the human factor in cryptocurrencies is very often the cause of large losses. And it is not always because of NFT: just recently one inattentive crypto-enthusiast lost more than 10 thousand dollars in Bitcoin because of one mistake, which could be avoided, if he double checked address of the recipient when sending transaction and carried out test transfer of small amount.

DinoDealer, on the other hand, has only to accept the loss – and he seems to realise it. The only thing he’s done is share the cryptocurrency wallet address of the bot that took him to EtherRock.

Bot address.

He also uploaded a new profile picture to Twitter, adding a weeping emoji in place of the pixel stone. And it’s a striking reference to his own ‘piercing’.

DinoDealer’s new avatar

This story also has a postscript as another joke. DinoDealer, in comments by an Etherium columnist, asked the blockchain’s “helpdesk” to help him get back his lost token. It wasn’t without bots and scammers either: the crypto-enthusiast was immediately prompted to contact people who supposedly could actually help him get his money back.

Comments from bots

Of course, no one can do that except the bot owner himself and the address where the NFT ended up. Nor does the management of the OpenSea platform have such authority: it itself only acts as a convenient intermediary between NFT owners, but the transactions are conducted on the blockchain. So remember, with crypto, you need to remain extremely attentive to details and your own actions.


We believe that this situation should really be an important reminder of the need to be very responsible when trading cryptocurrencies and digital assets in general, because if anything happens, there is no way to undo the action. In addition, we recommend using so-called hardware wallets to store expensive NFT tokens. In this case, the Ledger would show the details of the transaction on the screen before confirming it, which means that the collector would have an extra opportunity to notice his mistake.

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