RE: Trading bitcoin futures is a game changer for the whole crypto currency space. Here are some related aspects.
You are so kind @theminimalists! I share your enthusiasm over the potential of a nice crypto portfolio to do far more far more for me than a block of fiat-based fixed income holdings when I will need to spend down the capital in future years (God willing re. both health and longevity), and over the potential of community-based cryptos to lift people out of abject poverty at various places around the world. (This latter assumes that those community economies will evolve to the point that there will be minimal need for people to cross the bridge between crypto and fiat to buy bread and pay rent.
Re. my crypto holdings today, I have three copies of my private and public keys on paper, and on an external hard drive and a USB drive, neither of which are accessible to hackers for anything more than a few minutes at a time. The only pieces I have at an exchange more or less indefinitely are the few dollars locked in Steem Power.
P.S. I hope you are already or are planning to get nimble on one or two of the decentralized exchanges (at this point I have only plans but they will be implemented very soon -- two of them: Bitshares and Bisq). There are so many stories on the Net now about people not having access to their stuff at the exchanges at the most awkward times.
Re. Bitshares, I have spent several hours digging through the literature about their problems, going back to big debates about their “failure” during 2015. I feel their DEX has a solid future, except there is a good bet SEC will declare BTS to be an illegal security. I am wondering the Bitshares Foundation will be forced to take BTS off the market when that happens. (BTW, I read that getting SEC approval for your security offering costs about $300,000, so I wonder why @Dan’s dad doesn’t cash out some his crypto holdings and get on with seeking SEC approval for BTS.)
Anyway, if you see a key reason why my optimism on the future of the Bitshares DEX needs to be reconsidered do let me know. Also, I read a long and learned exchange in Reddit where it was agreed among the discussants that STEEM also faces the same fate as BTS, regarding SEC eventually declaring it to be an illegal security based on the Howey test.
I am new to cryptos only as a holder of the stuff. I was studying books and educational videos about bitcoin and blockchain back in early 2015; but until I stopped my active stock options trading in fall 2016 I never had any interest in buying cryptos.
Cheers!
Well I strongly believe you should never leave too much cryptocurrency in any exchange as you are leaving yourself to vulnerabilities that could be easily prevented with hard wallets, USB...etc. The vulnerabilities can be the work of internal or external hackers and believe me hackers are only going to grow.
I see exchanges as a quick way to buy cryptocurrency because I'm not a miner. The only thing that you have to be cautious about is the information you are giving them about yourself. Use a bank account/debit card you only use for cryptocurrency or use one that has very low funds. I have several bank accounts for this reason. It may seem paranoid but if you were ever robbed you won't feel like an idiot.
When I try to simplified my understanding of the blockchain technology behind STEEM I don't worry on the legitimacy of it as I have never spent any money buying STEEM. Because you can earn it through writing posts (posts of which id written on Reddit for free anyways and only get points for), I don't see a reason why not just continue to work for it. It's no different than YouTube. When I studied YouTube, you don't really start making money until you get 1 million views and before that YouTube makes a lot of money from advertising ads . There's always a give and take especially for something that's created more extensively. Seeing how steemit is growing I don't see it going anywhere.
Thanks for your info. I too have my fiat holdings spread across several banks, even though it's just a small total.
BTW -- I got deep into literature on the Howey test today, and I think I was wrong about BTS likely to being declared a security. @Dan and his dad have done a clever job of wrapping management into the BTS holders in a diffused way. Thus SEC is going to have a hard time claiming that there is one group holding the security and a separate group out their doing the work to bring profits to the security holders.
Unfortunately, Steem Power and Steem Dollar seem to be in a grey area. It's only grey though; because I think @Ned is going to argue that it is the work of the Steem Power holders that is creating and distributing their profits, and Steem Dollars are largely earnings for posts written, etc.
One thing to note is that when SEC disagrees with you and you lose the case the feds get the right to "seize assets". So if @Ned loses we will not have a chance to simply power down our SP; because it will be taken away.