Every small $$$ was so damn important to me that I only care about buying Bitcoin, i ignored going for a hardware wallet, until I lost $2000 using a software wallet, this was so painful that I got mad and took out some money to purchase my first Hardware wallet, something that I should have bought right from the start.
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I repeat, safety should comes first, if you are a beginner, start saving up for a secured open source hardware wallet now, we are heading into 2024, add this up to your plans if you don't have the money now, the safety of your Bitcoin is what will count in the end, not how much you have accumulated and lost.
I wonder what is that "software wallet" you used because I've been using Electrum ever since, and still didn't buy a Ledger (or any hardware wallet), but fortunately, I didn't experience getting scammed.
Don't blame the fact that you are only using a software wallet for what happened to you in the past. Blame the fact that you're a bit careless thus, you got scammed (or got hacked whatever). Whenever I'm browsing, I'm always cautious on the websites that I'm browsing because there might be a chance that it's a phishing website. At the same time, I'm always curious on the things that I'm downloading online because there might be some malware that's included on it that might get my assets.
Many people (including me) recommend other people to use hardware wallets so that their assets will be safer, but in the end, it's useless if you don't know which are scams and which are not. You can get a hardware wallet, and still get scammed if you don't know how to distinguish a scam. Like what others said here, hardware wallets might be the safest, but there's still a chance for it to get compromised like what's happening in the past.