Not your Keys, Not your crypto and avoid crypto scams.
Most of the user that joined cryptosphere are lured by it's price and price action and they have very little understanding on technical aspects of the crypto. In reality it should be the technical aspects that should be giving it's value but unfortunately market is not mature enough and currently investments and prices in most. Sometime promises are too big even experienced crypto users/investors get FOMOed that I think happened in case of ICP
Anyway FOMOing is an another topic on it's own but today question is "Are you holding keys for your crypto" ?
Where are you holding your crypto.
It is very important question that where are you holding your balance. Are you seeing your crypto balance in a site where you see "arbitrary" against your username?
Believe me this does not mean anything. Even a "trusted" faucet like Coinpot scammed the users with their coin when they were shutting down the business.
Are you holding your crypto in Exchanges? It is not safe as stories of exchanges getting hacked is not new. Even if it is trusted exchange and might have insurance but there will be some many legal formalities that need to be done before you can see your coins back.
Even cloud/web wallets also come under same limitation, It will not be suggested to have "large" amount of crypto sitting in your cloud wallets though you may can use them for day to day use.
If you do not have "Keys" of your wallet then it is really not your "crypto".
Where you should hold your crypto.
If you were holding crypto in above places and wondering where you should store then?
You should be using hardware wallet like Ledger and Trezor for it. You can use MEW wallets for Ethereum/BSC an polygon chain. You can you use desktop wallet downloaded from official site too.(I downloaded official BCH wallet few days ago.)
In case of Hive your account act as both your profile as well as wallet.
Consideration regarding wallets.
If you are purchasing Hardware wallet, make sure you buy from official sites, do not buy secondhand hardware wallets. If you are downloading the wallets, make sure or double sure that you are downloading from the official sites only.
Do not lose your keys.
Keys/Mnemonics phrase need to be stored safely so that no one else apart from you have the access to these keys. If any one get the access to these keys can steal your crypto.
On other hand it require utmost care on your side too as you also do not forget these keys. If you forget your keys, you will not able to access your crypto.
Great Freedom comes with Great Responsibility.
Crypto gives you freedom to "be your own bank" and opportunity to "Bank the unbank" but it also demand that you will take proper care of keys so you avoid leaking them and avoid forget them.
Following above step will make sure that you are owning the crypto but owning is not enough and you should not know how to Safeguard your crypto too. I will cover "How to keep safe your crypto" in next post.
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