If you guys know the biggest regret every single early adopter has that they all wish to have more bitcoins, you guys know what is the second biggest regret they have? they wish to have a storage of bitcoins more seriously. Every bitcoin adopter that i know from social platforms or personally they either had bitcoin stolen or they lost them at the really early days of bitcoin & the reason was that bitcoin was cheap and they din`t take its security seriously as now everyone take it.
I once had what we called Private Keys this is like how bitcoins secret value is stored in an address, I had my private keys in my laptop as soon as i got to airport i realized i forgot my laptop in background and when i went there i find out that my laptop was gone it was vanished as i ask around i called someone in airline crew took it luckily. i had tracker installed on my laptop so i can find out when someone turned on the computer it would take screenshot for me and it ended up with showing me that person who had my laptop so a friend of mine helped me to find out that person for me and we went to her house. I knocked on her door and i said hey, can you get me my laptop back? and she was like "I don`t know what you are talking about" we showed her that screenshot that we have of her using my laptop and then she gave me my laptop back but the computer hidden in white and all of the private keys were erased so i lost my 7 bitcoins at that time and the price of a single bitcoin was ten dollar so we can say i lost $70, Today the price of bitcoins are closer to $2,500 so you do that math and it is now $17,500 more or less it doesn`t feel great to not taking the security seriously in the early days and i lost it. If you still value the bitcoin like i do now then take it seriously and keep them safe.
But i am not the only one my one of the friend lost his laptop too and he lost his all bitcoins as well at that time and trust me he feels the same for not taking security very seriously but what can someone do when that is not in your hands.
If you just started in the bitcoin you may be asking well should i leave my bitcoins on in exchange? "NO" never leave your bitcoins your theory or your mineiro or non of your currency on any central exchange because i think all of the exchanges well-intentioned but they are run by humans and what you want is stuff run by math so the problem is at their central targets for bad intentioned hackers and good intentioned regulators but both of these people can really damage your life because exchanges run by people and they can make errors. I had an account at one of the crypto to crypto exchanges and i don`t trade often like i`ll use to get in and out of positions but i trade so infrequently they emailed me and said we will freeze your account if you not trade more! now the thing is i was like OK so i emailed them back and i wrote ok i will withdraw my funds because i don`t want my account frozen and they just never responded because they were so overloaded that it may be months before they see my email and in term they may freeze my account and this is the reality of internet money lands that you cannot leave your private keys in a central exchange it`s just too dangerous. The best thing to do is to get a hardware wallet because if you have money on exchanges or wallets i would recommend you moving to these hardware wallets as soon as you can because you never know whats going to happen whether its hacking, technical incompetence or operational competence on behalf of exchange which happen so often by the way.
Get your hardware wallets because this will save your butt and you won`t regret it, May be your crypto holding feel small today but i think there`s a change that crypto could be worth something someday so thats it.
I hope you enjoy this article and start thinking for increasing the security level as your steemit also have keys and you need to keep them safe and the best way is to have a hardware wallet.
Trezor Hardware Wallet - https://goo.gl/jVt4zd