If you want to witness a lot of drama, skip the big movies, someone once said. Instead, listen to the cryptocurrency exchanges from back in the day. The narrative of Cryptsy is the most clear example of this. It began out with so much promise, but then it crashed and burned in the most dramatic way possible. Quick info.

Imagine a computerized market full of hundreds of rare coins. Cryptsy was that crazy digital frontier. For a while, it was the location where both serious traders and casual dabblers tried out trading all kinds of digital tokens. There were so many coin listings that it was hard to believe. Some of them were so rare that they had only been mentioned in one Reddit thread. You went to the flea market with some Bitcoin and came back with the digital equivalent of bad Turkish delight: strange, new coins with names that no one could say.

But the mood started to change. People began to complain about slow withdrawals, transactions that wouldn’t go through, and a strange lack of support. There were other stories, such people saying that money had “gone missing,” support tickets were getting older like fine wine, and balances that never added up no matter how many times you hit F5. Some people joked that their money had gone to live on a farm in the north.

Then the big one came. The trade stopped. The money was trapped deep inside the digital vaults, where it was impossible to get to. People started to panic on the boards. The pointing of fingers turned into full-blown anger. Memes grew in popularity, just like they do on the internet. Some people promised never to use altcoins again. Some people just swore. And what about the people who had put their money in the exchange? A phishing pop-up made many people’s aspirations of landing on the moon disappear in one instant.

What truly went down? Years later, the truth still seems like it has been chopped up and mixed with a lot of misunderstanding. Some people blame big larceny. Some others say that the mishandling was so bad that it was almost funny. There were legal disputes, and lawyers were licking their lips at the pieces that were left. Regulators woke up and, for once, showed a lot of tenacity by going after the people behind the curtain.

The craziest aspect is that Cryptsy made a template, even though it was a bad one, for anybody who want to start their own crypto exchange. All of a sudden, everyone wanted to see unambiguous proof of funds everywhere, security audits weren’t optional, and traders looked at new exchanges like a scared alley cat looks at a rocking chair. That crazy race for trust? You may find the source in stories like these.

You might laugh now. You might have lost a part of your portfolio. Cryptsy might have taught you to be skeptical about crypto. The story gets told again and again because it’s like a scary campfire story for digital coins: sometimes the monster under the bed is real.