It’s been around for more than a hundred years, it’s the 80/20 rule. I’ll assume you’re familiar with it. If you’re not you don’t read enough. So how can we apply it to crypto? It’s simple, just do these two things and there’s an overwhelming chance you’ll never lose any of your coins. Even if you don’t use 2FA, your email gets hacked, your SIM card gets ported, whatever. It won’t matter if you just…
Never Leave Your Coins on an Exchange
Don’t be this guy. Ouch! Here’s a man who supposedly knows his way around crypto, he’s a fucking engineering manager at a custodianship company, yet he loses a tenth of a million because he kept it on an exchange. For what possible reason? If you are investing and holding onto your coins for years at a time, keeping them on an exchange is like going to a cigar convention with kerosene soaked clothes. Even if it doesn’t get hacked, check this out. Just a few days ago a guy lost $1,000 on Bittrex because they blocked withdrawals for all New York residents. He had to write it off as a loss. What about Quadriga? or Binance? The list could go on for an hour…
Use a Hardware Wallet
Seriously, so simple. A Nano Ledger S costs $70 after shipping. If you have more than $70 worth of crypto it’s worth buying one. They’re dead simple to set up and they make your life easy. Since they can hold dozens, hundreds, of currencies, you only have to remember a single seed phrase for backup purposes. That’s so much easier than trying to keep track of seed phrases and private keys for a dozen different wallets. Plus, these things are unhackable. Send your crypto there and forget it. One note though, NEVER store your seed phrase on a computer. People have lost their stacks when they uploaded pictures of their seed phrase to their Google Drive and a hacker gained access. Write the seed phrase down on paper and keep it somewhere safe. That’s really it.
If you just do these two super simple things your odds of losing your coins must be less than 1%, if that high. Yet people are people and as long as they ignore this stuff, funds will not be safu. That’s unfortunate for them but it doesn’t have to be you.