What Cryptocurrencies Represent? - Absolute Digital Ownership
Recently Peter Schiff posted on Twitter that his wallet "lost his Bitcoin password". This led to quite a stir on CryptoTwitter. Some offered to help him restore his wallet but most people ridiculed him on his tweet. Naturally, "Ok Boomer" was over the "replies" section.
In a subsequent post, Peter Schiff clarified that he mistook his wallet quick access PIN for his wallet password. He did not remember his password and most importantly, he did not store his recovery/seed phrase. As a result, his wallet is likely non-recoverable.
This small little incident led me to this topic. Cryptocurrencies represent absolute digital ownership and along with it comes responsibilities.
Ownership
Banks have made it so convenient to have our money stored with them that most of us no longer have custody of our money. There is nothing wrong with using banks to store our money. In fact, it was the best solution we had before cryptocurrencies. How else were we supposed to keep our money safe?
This changed with cryptocurrencies. For the first time after a long while, we can now keep all our wealth in a wallet which is simply just a public address with a private key. Since it is just a string of text, it can be easily secured. You can even remember the text by heart if you want to.
Responsibilities
With full ownership and custody of your own money, you have to be fully responsible for it. There is no one you can seek help with if you lose your private key and you are fully accountable, at least for now. Things might improve in the future as I am aware of solutions that allow social recovery, such as the Argent wallet, which basically allows your trusted friends/families to help you recover your wallet. As more people adopt such solutions, losing your keys may become less of a problem in the future.
Custodian Solutions vs Taking Charge
There are many people who love to have someone else manage their money for them and I can fully understand it. Some find it not worthwhile to have to be bothered by all these nitty-gritty. On the other hand, there are people who constantly feel that it is unsafe to have your money held by somebody else.
My view is that we have to have a balance. Before cryptocurrencies, we did not have much of a choice but now, we have. Hence, there is no harm weighing our options. Opt for custodian solutions and trust a centralized entity to keep your money? Or to hold your own money as cryptocurrencies which you have full control?
Source
Personally, I lean towards taking charge of my own money for 2 simple reasons. First, banks can fail, we have seen it in the great financial crisis during 2008/09. There is no such thing as being too big to fail. A recent example will be Deutsche Bank. It has been in a troubled state for a very long time and who is to say it cannot fail at its current state?
My other reason is that banks are taking our money and profiting from it while giving us negligible interest. Which naturally makes me feel that I am being ripped off 😕, and it is not a good feeling if you ask me.
That is why I decided to take partial ownership of my money. Don't get me wrong, most of my money are still in the traditional financial system. But a good share of it is already in the new system enabled by cryptocurrencies. So, think about it and let the thought sink in a little. Pure custodial solution for your money? Or take a dive and take up some ownership of your own money? It's your choice 😎.
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Cryptocurrency is like cash. If you have cash in your wallet and lost the wallet, your money is gone.
People need to start to take responsibility for their financial life. Cryptocurrency puts the onus on the individual. It is this responsibility that also provides protection from institutions like banks.
Posted via Steemleo
Haiyo!!! This guy is a pain in the ass after FUDing about Bitcoin and then this mishap happened. I hope he will promote Bitcoin after this incident. Upvoted!
Haha.. he is a fun guy to follow actually
Interesting news @culgin
Moment ago I've read post by @cryptomaniacsgr, and he mentioned that apparently this problem has been already solved.
Now I bumped into your publication about same issue and all I can say about this dude: So lame!
Cheers, Piotr
It is difficult to handle cryptocurrencies. Access to my BTC "could wallet" was a nightmare, and just I'm a computer fan for many years. We need the "Netscape moment", a modern, pleasant, user-friendly, but really secure solution. Biometric identification, perhaps? Or this won't work because of privacy concerns?
There are many wallets that support biometric authentication already, for instance Argent is one of them. It is still important to backup your keys or restore phrases so that you can access your cryptos even if you lose your phone.
Congrats! on your upvotes from the IBT Community