TAKE YOUR BITCOIN OFF EXCHANGES. IT IS NOT PROTECTED.
https://ift.tt/BAOmnCN
Your personal wallet is also not subject to protections or insurance provided by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation or the Securities Investor Protection Corporation.
I’m all for holding your own keys, I think that it’s one of the key innovations of Bitcoin: being able to be the sole owner and custodian of your digital funds.
But it’s not risk free. It takes work to securely self-custody your crypto. There are going to be institutions that offer custody services so that if someone doesn’t want to do that work themselves, they can choose to trust a 3rd party and leave all the work to them. No one is required to use those services, but I’m not going to begrudge someone who’s not savvy enough to set up a hardware wallet when they choose to leave their coins on an exchange, or even a bank when banks finally start to catch on that crypto is the future and start to offer crypto deposit accounts.
The more options for 3rd party custody that exist for crypto, the more you know that crypto adoption is growing. New crypto users should not be made to feel bad if they feel safer keeping their coins on Coinbase instead of trying to custody their own keys.
The best option for most people is to first learn about how to safely self-custody, and only move coins off-exchange once they feel comfortable with it. And some people might never feel comfortable with it. And that’s OK too.
Cryptocurrency
