Quote from: ummart66 on May 27, 2018, 01:59:22 AM

Hey everyone,

Figured it never hurts to help remind people who may be new to cryptocurrency that they control their investments. This may be a good thing, or a bad thing. The negative aspects of this is that of course, they need to make sure that their investments are safe.

Some general advice is:
-Never leave funds on an exchange unless you plan on trading with it. If you're planning on buying it and forgetting it, definitely make sure to move it to a wallet.
-You need to regularly monitor what is happening to your cryptocurrency. With so many main nets and airdrops happening, you need to be sure to move your funds into the correct places so that you qualify to receive thee airdrops, and so that you receive new coins following your crypto's main net release. For airdrops, generally, you need to just have your crypto inside a wallet. If your crypto is held on an exchange, it may or may not be paid out to you. This is a loss of free money.
Mainnet releases often require action of the user. I suggest subscribing to the twitter pages of your investments at minimum, if you want to go the extra mile, spend a few mine weekly checking up on forums/subforums/channels that focus on your crypto's discussion. It is easy to forget about your investment, then realize they did a coin swap that you no longer can sign up for, and now the coins you do hold are worthless.

-If you can't afford to lose your investment, buy a hardware wallet. For me, when I owned crypto worth 2x the price of an average hardware wallet I made sure to buy one. They're definitely worth the investment. The two main hardware wallets are Trezor and Nano Ledger. These work by keeping your private keys safe, so for you to access your accounts/move money, you have to have the actual wallet in your possession. This makes it difficult/impossible? for you to lose your funds.
-If your cryptocurrency is not supported on a hardware wallet (not every one is, you'll need to make sure that your wallet can handle the crypto you own), you should look into downloading a wallet onto a computer that you don't use often. Ideally, this computer will NOT be used to browse the internet, it will be devoted ONLY to be used for wallets. Ideally, you'd download the wallets onto a USB, transfer it to the PC (without internet connection), install everything, then connect it to the internet so that the wallets synch and update. Then, you'd make sure to write the PUBLIC addresses down, save them, then keep the computer disconnected from the internet until you need to move fund out of the wallet.
You can send funds from a different computer, and even though your wallet computer isn't connected to the internet, it can still receive transfers into it. You'd need to synch with the network before you can send, so only connect the computer to the internet when you need to move fund out. Ideally, you'd want a Linux operating system on this computer, as they are 'safer' than windows computers.

Ultimately, you need to always keep in mind that you and only you are in control of your investments. If you do not own the private keys, you do not own your cryptocurrency. If the exchange that your funds are on gets shut down, you may not get your crypto back for a very long time (people affected by mt.Gox took 5 years before they got paid back- and even then they ended up losing on a ton of money because they were paid back in the USD value that the bitcoins were worth at the time of the hack, something like $10 while every bitcoin was worth thousands).

If anyone has additional advice to add, feel free to share.

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The crypto world is at an early age in addition to its complexity, volatility, security problems and a lot of additional features.
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