Although I knew about Bitcoin for a few years now, I was never really involved much with the community. But after I started investing in Bitcoin at the beginning of the year, I was more and more involved into dealing with bitcointalk, youtube and reddit. I was quite surprised when the hard fork was announced that a lot of people seem to spread tehir anxiety through the whole community.
I was affected by that as well. I am used to gaming communities where it is usual to help each other out with qualified comments and I always feel comfortable dealing with strangers about certain topics. So I expceted the same when I started to look for further information at reddit or bitcointalk.
Big mistake!!
I ended up with the belief it is more 'secure' to keep my bitcoins on Electrum wallet so I have full ownership about my private keys. This made it pretty much impossible for me to benefit from selling my BCC when markets opened a few days ago. Even the support afterwards was quite horrible. No help at bitcointalk or reddit. Instead people were banning anc censoring at reddit because bitcoin cash is now handled as an altcoin. Bitcointalk was not a helpful source as well when it comes to how to get my bitcoin cash out of Electurm. And every second thread was about how you can't trust exchanges and have to pay attention about your privacy etc.
Guess what! Time to start from scratch! So here is my new mindset when it comes to dealing with cryptocurrency:
- It is ok to keep my bitcoins on established exchange websites like Kraken or Bittrex.
- Stay away from reddit and bitcointalk. It takes way too much time to find really helpful threads.
- No big deal to handle my private keys and seeds. Fairly simple. I don't visit porn sites or warez stuff - in general I don't visit sites where I expose myself to malicious stuff. So I don't have to be overly careful. I never opened stupid and obviously dodgy mail attachments. Instead of overcomplicating things I will simply pay attention as usual.
- 2 Factor authentication will do the rest. I use it whenever possible. So even if for some reasons my password is hacked I am still ok cuz nobody can logon to my exchange accounts.
I know this mindset doesn't apply for everyone. But I just want to invest some $ in crypto and this seems to be the best approach. Listening to the community on reddit and bitcointalk left me uncertain about a decent strategy so I will keep it simple. Bitcoin is not a grey area anymore and established sites earned my trust.
Take care guys!