Storing your coins on exchanges? I used to do that, too. I don't anymore... and here's why.

Hi everyone,
I'm Ryan. I entered the world of cryptocurrencies in 2012 when Bitcoin was trading for around $130/ea. At that time, I knew next to nothing about the technology. I remember my thinking was it might become quite disruptive in the future, but it wasn't until about a year later that I began to believe there might be some value in investing in the tech. Of course, that was when Bitcoin had its massive rally to around $1200 or so and the alt coins started popping up daily. I remember seeing a coin called Sexcoin up by some absurd amount (3000% I believe) on CoinMarketCap. It fell sharply after, but it was enough to get me interested in speculating.

Regrettably, I did most of my trading at that time on Cryptsy

I'm sure you all know the story, but for those that do not, Cryptsy was a cryptocurrency exchange that was apparently hacked a couple years ago and they refrained from reporting the incident. This ultimately led to them shutting down the operation very abruptly once they realized they weren't getting the stolen coins back. Most of my alt-coin holdings (and probably many of yours, too) were lost when this happened. Fortunately for me, I had moved my Ethereum out of there at the last minute.

I am so absolutely, stupid effing lucky for having got my coins off that exchange. My speculation in alt-coins (namely Ethereum) helped my wife and I secure a 3% downpayment on our home in the Pacific Northwest last year. In hindsight, I would have held longer (as we all know Ethereum went through the roof this year), but I have no regrets. The recent rally has reasserted my confidence that there's still a lot of growth in this space and there's so many incredible ideas popping up daily.

Alt-coins have evolved far beyond "Bitcoin for X"

There's far too much cool tech here now for me not to jump back in for the long-haul. Last month, I began moving some of my remaining ETH into other alts such as PIVX, CLOAK, Aragon (and of course, STEEM!). However, I realized I was falling back into my same bad habit of storing coins on the exchanges again! At this point, I decided I would spend a day getting all/most of my holdings into a mix of encrypted flash drives and paper wallets.

So now all is well... or is it?

With this latest tumbling of the markets, It was clear my holdings were losing value, but I had no idea how much. After a few sessions of doing manual calculations, I decided I would throw together a simple web app to make my life easier. Enter MyCoinBag.

This is a simple site that pulls from the CoinMarketCap API and allows you to declare your holding(s). You only need a Google Account to use it and there are no effing ads. Yay! Hopefully it will make your life easier, too, and I'm all ears to suggestions on how you might like to see it improved.

Whether you use my app or not, please don't store your coins on the exchanges. It's easy to assume some of these sites are too big to fail. I get it. But it's hard to ignore that exchanges are a massive target with all that magic internet money they hold.