While the idiot tadamichi wants to pretend every person has the technical expertise and self discipline to secure their crypto.
The following shows , it should be a personal decision as risks vary per individual.
Until crypto exchanges are forced to insured a fiat value of their account holding.
Self Custody failures below.
https://www.jumpstartmag.com/top-3-stories-of-lost-bitcoin-fortunes/James Howell’s lost hard drive
In 2013, 36-year-old engineer James Howell threw away the hard drive containing the cryptographic key to his Bitcoin wallet while clearing out his house. Howell used to have two identical hard drives and ended up throwing away the wrong one, locking himself out of his 8,000 BTC holdings, which would be worth close to US$158 million as per the current exchange rate.
Stefan Thomas’s lost password
Former Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Ripple, Stefan Thomas, made headlines in 2021 for forgetting the password of the hard drive that contained the key to his Bitcoin wallet. The hard drive, known as the Iron Key, has been designed to be impervious to all attacks and only provides users with ten attempts before they are permanently locked out of the drive. As of 2021, Thomas is down to his final two attempts.
The Bitcoin wallet that Thomas cannot access contains 7,200 BTC, which would be worth over US$142 million today. As per Thomas, the only other way to retrieve the information would be by breaking the drive apart, removing its chip and putting it under a scanning electron microscope to read the individual flash memory cells.
However, this process would require a lot of time and money, and even after that, there are chances that he would fail to retrieve the information. Thomas has been trying to log into the hard drive since 2012 and says he has now made peace with his loss.
Individual X’s Bitcoin hacking challenge
If you are a frequent reader of our website, you would be familiar with how the crypto space has its fair share of hackers and cybercriminals. Many cybercriminals steal crypto wallets and try to unlock them to access the funds inside. If they are unsuccessful in cracking the passwords, they sell them to other hackers.
The same had been happening with Individual X’s wallet, the seventh-largest Bitcoin wallet in the world. As far back as 2018, it had been making the rounds among hackers, who would pry the wallet open to access the 69,000 BTC (worth over US$1.18 billion as per the current exchange rate) it contains.
The blockchain analysis conducted by Chainalysis on this wallet found that all the funds inside had been sent via transactions from the dark net marketplace Silk Road. The site was used for money laundering and drug trade until the Federal Bureau of Investigation shut it down in 2013. The founder of the site, Ross William Ulbricht, was arrested in the same year and has since been serving a life sentence. While the Silk Road was still online, an unnamed individual, referred to as Individual X by the authorities, had been stealing from Ulbricht by manipulating a security loophole in the site.
As of 2020, U.S. federal authorities have seized all the funds in Individual X’s wallet. In 2021, the government signed an agreement with Ulbricht that a portion of the seized Bitcoins would be used to pay the US$183 million in restitution as a part of his sentence.
FYI:
The other elephant in the room,
the price of btc can crash in minutes verses fiat at anytime,
which is why being able to trade out faster to fiat could save you millions.
Which is why some prefer exchanges over home wallets, faster trading time.
What good is owing btc, when it loses 80% of it's fiat value and you were unable to trade out.
https://medium.com/the-capital/this-bitcoin-family-had-the-perfect-exit-strategy-but-are-now-moving-back-into-the-market-bfa571c78b4cThis Bitcoin Family
Although they say they lost more than $1 million in cryptocurrency this year,
That $1 million of fiat value, their # of bitcoins has not changed.
So much for self custody.