Owning bitcoin should be boring

First published 9 November 2022

Why bitcoin ownership should be boring.
I’m writing this in the wake of another crypto exchange/fund (FTX) getting wiped today, potentially losing their clients’ bitcoin and crypto holdings.

During this past cycle we’ve seen exchanges and funds offer investors yields on their bitcoin and other crypto-currencies, even offering their own freshly minted tokens.

The risk as an investor is that you are trusting a third-party with ownership of your private keys, hence ownership of your bitcoins. The worst case scenario being that these exchanges can lose your bitcoins through hacks, malicious actions or over-zealous practices.

I’ve been an educator in this space since 2017 and my message has been simple and not wavered:

Step 1: Buy bitcoin
Step 2: Remove your private keys from exchanges
Step 3: Keep your bitcoins in a cold storage device
Step 4: Repeat.

My partner and I launched BitcoinBasics.help with the intent communicating this message to as many people as possible. We never promoting anything other than bitcoin and rejected sponsorship offers from companies that were not Bitcoin-only.

We have not as a business been lucrative, but we’ve weathered several meltdowns, and at no stage has any of our clients contacted us concerned about the price of bitcoin or their holdings. Because they followed steps 1-4.