First experiences are always different. You made the first investment of your life with $25 but you still remember that investment. Those who have a long time dream of one day investing in bitcoins and for that purpose get a lot of peace of mind when they manage money and invest in a stage of money management. I have heard many stories on forums who have struggled and invested in bitcoins. You started investing with $25 and of course you have invested a lot of money over this long period and sold your investments but still you show the beginning of your investment and want to know how other people's beginning was. The initial phase on your part is as exciting as it is for most investors and a lot of fun.

Sometimes it is a good thing when we have experience like this losing little amount of Bitcoin in a Ponzi scheme or third party web sites.
This things happens to many of us that first invested in Bitcoin in 2017, that year there are numerous third party websites that claims to double our Bitcoin if we bring referrals that would join us to create privileges and opportunity for others too. Many people lost their assets that worth more than $80 million to Ponzi schemes.

This story is very common among early Bitcoin adopters. Many of them never believed that Bitcoin would be this big so they handled the Investment carelessly. I don't also blame them because Bitcoin was a radical shift from the status quo and it will take more than faith and determination to believe that something good will come out of the cryptocurrency. Many of them lost the investment because they misplaced their wallet password or seed phrase. While others were driven by greed and were enticed to invest in a get-rich-quick scheme. These scam projects promised great returns from Investment and many people lost their funds.

But the good news is that there is still a great opportunity to still invest in Bitcoin because it is still in its infant stage. There is no need to dwell on regrets but we have to focus on raising funds that can facilitate our Investing in Bitcoin because the price will keep increasing in the future.

What new ignorant investors don't know is that you don't invest in bitcoin through a third party, in real sense bitcoin was created to eliminate anything third party involvement in our transactions. Cutting off the middle man who's the evil behind traditional banking system.  It's hard to bear losing our money but at least you have learnt through experience however, make sure to be doing your own research in this industry it will save you from further loss out if ignorance. Like they said if you think knowledge is too costly to attain then try ignorance.

Lol don't worry about it — you mostly need to lose your coins before you learn how to protect them, may it be from scams, from overtrading, trading shitcoins, and the like. What important is that you've learned your lesson so you don't experience something similar and lose your coins once again.

Maybe he meant third-party hype sites are ponzi schemes or scam exchanges? If they store in a non-custodial wallet then they will never lose unless the seed phrase is lost because there will be no more access to the bitcoins they have but if they bet on a site that is not trusted it will definitely be lost.

Usually the first person to lose because it is too tantalizing with the offer of ROI from other sites, so it is easier to be deceived than the reality, from that experience they can learn and be more careful again, but now OP already understands how to secure bitcoin properly.

It's great to receive notifications indicating that Bitcoin has entered your wallet.
Losing Bitcoin because you don't know how to save it. For beginners, losing Bitcoin is due to various mistakes caused by not knowing how to store and maintain it.

I didn't immediately enter the world of Bitcoin investment even though someone told me about Bitcoin on one occasion. I learned slowly what I had to do before I entered it.
The first thing I learned was about wallets and their security. If I have a lot of money and can afford to buy Bitcoin, if I don't know how to store and maintain it, then I think it will be a waste. And for me, when I was still a beginner, learning about wallets and their security was the foundation for starting activities in Bitcoin and other coins.

I was mislead by the first sentence " Bitcoin is completely illegal in my country.." I'm not sure if you are referring to it as now or in 2017 but I'm pretty sure it wasn't banned that year, not even a single country would ban it coz it is powerless, I could say, that time not until it exploded that year as well. Buying my first bitcoin got me a giggle, it is memorable how the bitcoin stored in your wallet. I remember using a local e-wallet that stores bitcoin that time, and it really felt like you are ahead of the majority of people coz you are storing a money on different form and it is not a 'digital' or 'wired money.

I didn't invest per se. My first couple of satoshis were gotten from faucets sites back when faucets were still a thing. As you can imagine, the amount wasn't big (a couple of 200-1k sats per site here and there). Anyway, I gathered what I had and poured all of it into a ponzi scheme called MMMUnited. At the time, I barely knew about ponzi schemes. It was until the site was no longer operational that I learnt my lesson.



At the time, there was barely useful resources about Bitcoin. One could barely tell the difference between what was legit and what was ponzi scheme scam. It's easier these days.