Why You Should Move Your Crypto From An Exchange To A Nano Ledger Immediately
The idea of cryptocurrency and blockchain has brought with it an entirely new mindset on how money is understood, used, stored, saved, earned, traded and valued.
Creating a brand new economic model for the entire planet from scratch was never going to be an easy task and it would take years to perfect, billions fiat value to be used and traded and millions of users to get us to the point that we are today.
Cryptocurrency is only in its infancy with Bitcoin being the oldest at 10 years old which means there has not been much time to educate users on how to use the facilities as developers and companies focus mainly on improving the speed, safety, security and scalability of the technology.
When you’re so focused on building the rial roads you’re not really going to care much about showing someone how to buy a train ticket, are you? Which is where we are at in the crypto space today
Digital currency isn’t funny money
Ever since we solved the double-spend problem digital money has become a reality and while this is a major breakthrough for us, the current cryptocurrency ecosystem in many cases forces encourage us or doesn’t educate the user on the correct way to use and store these valuable digital assets.
It’s a habit that has been encouraged from our days of using fiat currency and letting the banks handle and hold our money while we tap into it every so often when we need it, the rest of the time its borrowed to someone else.
While it would be impractical for you to keep all your physical money on you or in your home and to set up your own digital vault would well be out of most of the scope of banking regulations, crypto brings us a way to truly own our own money.
Why you should keep your own currency
In the current ecosystem to access cryptocurrency, the majority of us would approach some sort of exchange and trade our fiat money for the cryptocurrency of our choice.
The problem with this is that exchanges do not always make use of the blockchain immediately for every transaction due to the speed issues, which is why they do not provide you with your own personal account keys but only a login to access your funds and point it to where you would like it to go, similar to what central banks do with our funds today.
In the meantime, exchanges are able to literally do with those funds as they please and benefit from your money and the value you put into the exchange and don’t adhere to all the strict regulations central banks have so you do not have the assurance if they go down that you can recover your money as you would from a government tied bank.
This makes it a dangerous place to leave your money and why you should place them in a facility where you have the only access to the funds. Only once you remove the funds from the exchange to a hot wallet or cold storage does it actually physically come into your possession.
Keep your keys, keep your crypto
This can be done in two ways, via a hot wallet or via cold storage.
Cold storage at the moment is still the safest way and most tangible way to store your cryptocurrency. You are literally loading your money onto a physical device that can be stored for safekeeping.
Cold storage comes in a variety of brands and types such as the Nano S Ledget and Nano X Ledger.
These USB thumb drive look-alikes have been specifically designed to store and safeguard cryptocurrency from thieves, hackers and even your kids who happened to come across a USB drive and try to put their pictures or files on it.
Once you have access to your own cryptocurrency you can then load it onto exchanges, trade it peer to peer or simply keep it stored in a vault for safekeeping, it really is up to you. It’s your money and you choose how to use it.
This is the power of financial sovereignty and these are the financial habits we will need to get used to in the future as we move towards a decentralised society.
This is my entry for the — Win 150 STEEM and a Ledger Nano S — Writing Contest!
