News out of the UK yesterday about a family being held at gunpoint and forced to turn over thousands in bitcoin. This is a big reason why you should never post your holdings or earning on the internet. Most of the time you’ve slipped up somewhere trying to remain private online or you are a public blogger/vlogger/internet person. It’s not that hard to find where you physically live and/or get close enough and social engineer someone who will give you up (esp if they know the payout is large).
Crypto is billed by some as a deinstitutionalized banking system (I know it’s much more now). Which is great! I am my own bank, I don’t pay fees, I can invest, I can be private etc etc …. But, with a bank, your funds are federally insured (in the USA anyways), they employ and deploy many counters to both physical and digital attempts to rob the bank of the money they are holding. So, you pay fees, and have many other issues with the banks, but if the bank gets robbed…
- You’re likely safe at home/work/somewhere that isn’t the bank
- Your money is safe and not lost forever
- Cameras and firewalls or some kind of measure will likely catch/stop the criminals
Some other news earlier last week talks about how your public key and your sloppiness online can easily tie bitcoin transactions back to the real life you. In the same way that you can find this bitcoin trader to rob, if the people who robbed him do not deploy some form of laundering of the coins (even if they do), eventually they will slip up and the real-world identities will be uncovered (which as terrible as this story is, I hope ultimately is a silver lining).
Some say that this is a great case for privacy coins like @Monero or @Sumokoin or @Ignitioncoin but if the bad guys know you have the coins it doesn’t matter what alt coin it is, they can still physically force you to give them up (or blackmail). Being in a privacy coin might even make a better target because they can hide the theft right from the initial transaction.
We as a community need to develop and advise as many people as we can of the safest and best practices to keep your personal crypto bank safe. With the amount of new people coming into the arena and the fact that we all believe this is the future, the attack surface is only going to grow. I can honestly see this becoming a major issue and can push blockchain towards centralization and regulation, which I am not sure we want. Here are some tips I have learned during my crypto journey, please add yours to the conversation.
- Never disclose your holdings online (or anywhere really)
- Try to keep your real-world identity as private as possible
- Use alt accounts that are not tied back to the real you when posting online
- Deploy cameras or other physical security systems at your home
- Store your assets that you are not going to trade or spend in a cold wallet offline
- Put that cold wallet in a safe place that is not in your place of residence (safe deposit box etc)
- Put your recovery keys in a safe place that is not in your place of residence
- You can have offline info at your residence but protect it with encryption and auto deletion methods and store a duplicate off site
- Use two and three factor authorizations for your accounts to protect from digital attacks
- Don’t post how much your Steemit account is worth, you are sending an invitation
If someone wants what you have bad enough crypto or not, they are going to try everything they can to take it. I don’t want to scare anyone away from this technology, but the onus of safety/protection is on you. You typically don’t keep tens of thousands of USD on your person or in your house, do you? No insurance, no fraud protection/transaction reversal makes for a nice target. Be proactive especially if you are heavily invested and take steps to protect and or trace if the worst-case scenario ever happens.
Please resteem, comment and help the conversation of how we can all be safer with our personal banks, like to help raise awareness.