You’ve been in the crypto world for many years. You have witnessed the stability and growth of the decentralized financial system, a path to true financial freedom. You’ve ground your way up from a few dollars to now owning a portfolio worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. You followed your guts and put your money where your mouth is, and succeeded in building yourself a steady stream of income. Your eyes are now fixed on the future, a day when you will retire and finally get to live off your many years of income accumulated.
Watching the growth of your portfolio, you thought about how careful you need to be to ensure the security of your wealth, so in the time coming, you will have something valuable to pass on to your children. You did all you could to secure your portfolio and avoid any incident of hacking into your crypto wallets. You believe that not securing your wallets from hackers is your greatest adversary. You have done well, but you are mistaken.
Your most formidable adversary to your years-accumulated digital wealth isn’t that guy who asked about your crypto progress. It's not the Lazarus group or a super-hacker. The biggest enemy you have to your digital wealth isn't far from you; it's that person you see looking back at you from the mirror every morning. Your biggest energy is you. To put it more clearly, you are making one simple, deadly, and avoidable mistake that could lead to eternal regrets.
Your crypto portfolio is entirely in your hands to keep safe, and nobody can do that for you. We are told to keep our crypto wallet safe and avoid exposing our passwords and seed phrases to any other person. This is the mantra for absolute crypto safety. Because of this, the majority of us are loners in our crypto journey. You alone know what your crypto portfolio is worth, because you are the only one who can access your wallets. And you are confident in what you are doing because you believe you are doing the right thing to build wealth for your family.
In the conventional world, men make wills to pass their wealth to their children after they die, and this is carried out with the help of a lawyer and the bank that holds the safe. But in crypto, writing will have little or no effect on a digital wealth if one salient but important thing isn't done by the one who owns the wallet, which in this case could be you and I.
We are building digital wealth with the purpose of passing it over to our children or family, but none of our family members or children knows anything about Blockchain technology. They know nothing about crypto nor how to operate a wallet. On top of that, we purposely kept everything away from them, we have no intention to show them our portfolio, wallets passwords and seed phrases. This is the case for many people in crypto space. In the event of sudden death, we are certain our years of labor and our precious digital wealth will be lost forever. This is why we are our biggest enemies.
Recently, I had a conversation with a friend online and our discussion aligned with this post. My friend shared how frustrating and difficult it has been for him to teach any of his family members about crypto and how to operate a wallet. He fears that if he were to died today all his years of labor and crypto wealth would be lost forever.
According to him, he downloaded a wallet on his son's phone, set it up and transferred some crypto to it for the son to keep. This way, if the young man wasn't interested before, seeing the value of the crypto would make him have the interest to learn how to operate the wallet.
Similarly, I face the same challenge in teaching my son about crypto and Blockchain technology. Although I have shown him my crypto portfolio and its overall value, he is still having difficulty cooperating with me even when he knows that all the crypto could be his in the future.
I do not want to be the enemy to my own future. All the years of grinding with sleepless nights should not be in vain. I must do all I can to teach my son how to operate a wallet and let him know about my password and seed phrases and where I saved them. This is very important to me, and I believe it's the same for you if you are a person building something for the future.
This is not a call for anyone to be afraid. Rather, it's a reason to be prepared. By having it in mind that anything can happen when we least expect it, we can prepare ahead in case of an eventuality. Let us not be our own enemy. We should do the right thing to be doubly sure that the future we are working for is actually secured.
The image used is Canva designed.