Bitcoin Forum

If you are holding any crypto on exchanges. Cold storage all that crypto. Get an old laptop or desktop you never use and use Electrum for BTC or use MyEtherWallet for ETH and ERC20 tokens. Don't connect that laptop to the internet and you got secure cold storage. If you have a hardware wallet then use that.

If you have any fiat on exchanges. Withdraw them into your bank account ASAP!.

If you have any stablecoins either convert into real fiat and withdraw into your bank account OR buy crypto with those stablecoins.

This FTX contagion keeps spreading. Right now the issue is with Silvergate bank. They are one of the banks which transfers and holds crypto for most exchanges. The banks stock value has already plummeted 50% since Nov 8th. They claim to have little exposure to FTX. However why is the stock going down everyday???

If Silvergate bank stops operations. What will happen? Who knows. But I don't want to find out.

I don't believe anymore "We are fine!". "We had little exposure to FTX", "etc".

Stop this panic, everyone should be aware that the exchange is not a safe depository for their assets. Therefore, they don't have to withdraw their funds because of FTX, but rather the safety of their assets.

Somehow I think the impact of FTX will continue to spread, but don't let it turn into FUD for crypto. I will be making withdrawals not because of FTX or anything else going wrong, but purely because I care about the safety of my assets in the long term.

GBTC is almost reaching 50% discount to Bitcoin. There is speculation that the fund might have to liquidate to save Genesis.

Currently each share holds $15.19 worth of Bitcoin on the fund, however you can buy a share for $8.10 which means its currently trading at a 46.6% discount.

Basically its like buying bitcoin at $8800. A price not seen since Covid crash pretty much.

Silvergate Capital is not that big player. At least for exchanges like coinbase or binance. According to this article (https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/heres-why-silvergate-si-is-tumbling-on-binance-ftx-led-chaos) - Silvergate Capital hold $12 billion of funds. Its less than 4% of bitcoin supply and ~20% of binance reserves - https://www.binance.com/en/blog/community/our-commitment-to-transparency-2895840147147652626

Its a dengerous situation, i agree, but not the end of crypto.

SI stock price dump is frightening but its still +50% from the mid 2020 prices. It pump and dump just like crypto.

As a treader, it is not easy to just withdraw fiat, I do not have fiat, i use stable coins Instead and I can never withdraw fiat. To make it easy, buy a hardware wallet which support bitcoin and altcoins, then move all your coins from exchanges to the hardware wallet if you are not using it to trade. I have not more than $250 left on the exchange I am using, which is for trading, leveraging it 2 or 3x to reach the amount desired for it.

I guess there's nothing wrong with what the OP is trying to say.

If we have fiat, then withdraw and then hold, still the king though, so we might as well have some in this time.

But crypto, it's different, again, not your keys, not your coins and with the current crisis that we have right now, its better to have fully control of our crypto, have in a wallet that we have full custody and not on exchanges.

Heads up: Just buy a Ledger/Trezor hardware wallet. I don't think most people can confidently and properly secure a computer, even if it's not being used for daily personal usage.

Fair enough. FTX has a multi billion dollar loss and I’m sure that all crypto company that exposed loss a lot of FTX bankruptcy. Avoiding all the exchange, DeFi and Blockchain involve is the best way to avoid loss when the company went down. Most of the FTX network are all centralized, It’s very risky to let your balance stay in there since a lot of money is loss due to SBF financial mismanagement.

Currently I’m on fiat because crypto even stablecoin might suffer huge dump when the general market enters the panic mode.

You are right, panic is not appropriate here.
It has always been known that exchanges are not a safe place to store crypto currencies, which was warned many times, but most ignored it until the crash of FTX. Now all of a sudden everyone is fussing about it. This is another hype, but if earlier it was hype for the growth of the price of crypto currencies, now it is a hype for the withdrawal of crypto currencies from exchanges. It was necessary to prepare for this in advance, and not when exchanges freeze funds and block withdrawals.

It's hard that this topic can cause panic, unless someone thinks that it will be read by millions of those who invest in cryptocurrencies. Of course, this will not be the case, so it is just one more in a series of warnings to all those who think that crypto exchanges are some kind of banks where it is safe to store their coins.

All those who believe in it have serious problems with basic things, and I'm not sure that any non-custodial crypto wallet can help them in the sense that even in that case they won't mess something up. Knowledge first, and only then investment.

Little exposure is just a term to use so you won't panic. The warning is all there, it's all up to you if you are going to still keep your coins on changes.
The ones staking coins will have second thoughts about withdrawing them, the earnings are hard to resist and it's easier to dump also when the coins are in the exchanges.

I'm more afraid of using an old laptop. You best write down your seed and hide it where no one knows but you.

That fund has always looked very enticing, but with such high fees you’re almost making a bet on the fund being liquidated or approved to convert to an ETF before fees and investor fatigue craters your investment. I think a lot of people don’t understand that dynamic and invest based on the premium alone, which is why so many people have lost money with it. However, we are nearing a point where the fees are worth the risk in order to capture the premium while Bitcoin is cheap. I’ve never owned any GBTC, but I’m considering adding some to a retirement account.

It's advisable to cashout funds from every third party platforms and convert all your money to trustful currencies, but it's not possible for every investors, because we have our funds locked at investments' platforms and until the investment period ends, we can only pray that those platforms not have gotten involved with bankupted partners and to not get bankupted as well anytime soon.

For those who still haven't disabled the automatic investment lock option, it's better they do this right now, though.

Positively you're right, I'm sure topics like this don't have the negative effect of causing panic. I'm sure crypto users on forum already know that exchanges are not the best depository of assets that will give them security, exchanges are places to trade so it's hard to believe the panic would set in as soon as they read a topic like this.

But actually unexpected things may happen due to media action, they can say that millions of bitcointalk users have to plan withdrawals on crypto exchanges. But that's just something that doesn't seem to worry too much.

We are not fine because we have given our funds to the centralized exchanges and unfortunately these exchanges and investment firms have broken our trust and we are never going to trust them again.

We are fine as long as we have crypto in decentralized wallets. We have the keys for our coins.
 
Also we are fine even if bitcoin is dumped a bit more because of these exchanges' crisis. It will give opportunity to get more bitcoins for cheap. It can be an opportunity for lifetime.

Not all exchanges but only centralized exchanges are the ones that we must avoid because issues that happened on FTX can possibly happen with them soon but we can continue using some of the DeFi and Blockhain platforms because situations like this where everyone is panicking is the best time to attack and accumulate more coins. If you have accumulated enough coins from the past then you can lay low for a while because the market is toxic right now and it can affect your decision making.

It's impossible for stable coins to dump unless if that stable coins are same with UST but we should properly pick a stable coin or the one which has a better reputation. It's not wrong to have some fiat but cryptos are still way better for some reason.

From what I can tell. There is some article out on Twitter about 3AC borrowing BTC from Genesis and converting them to GBTC.

Do you remember in 2021 when you were offered almost 10% to lend your BTC? There was also huge premiums on futures BTC and ETH. Something like 2% a month.

So I think 3AC borrowed BTC from Genesis, converted to GBTC and were
Going to capture the premium but the premium disappeared. So now I think they owed a lot of money to Genesis and went bankrupt.

It was fine for the last few months because there was no bank run on Genesis. But after FTX collapsed people requested their crypto back from Gemini, which was held by Genesis and they don’t have enough to cover withdraws, hence they need to raise funds.

Basically contagion keeps spreading.

This is the reason why I have to use my hard wallet now and generate new paraphrase to make sure that I’m safe from any hard. There’s a lot of FUD and panic with the exchanges now, many wants to get out as soon as possible and that is really ok. If you have hard wallet maximize it now, don’t wait for the worst to happen.

What the OP is saying is correct however this should be our standard behavior, it should not be necessary for the collapse of a major exchange for people to remember to keep their coins under their own care, after all we know that no matter how solid a financial institution may look they can always disappear very quickly under the right circumstances, and while this may seem unlikely to happen if you keep you coins in such an exchange all the time then it is way more likely you will end up becoming a victim of such crash, and this is exactly what happened to those which had their coins at the FTX exchange.

well, people need to be reminded with these basic things because some are getting too complacent in time. they will only check if things are in order when certain situations arise like this ftx drama. this will not be the last so yeah, make sure your assets are safe and secure under your full control. most of us know what to do but sometimes we neglect things when there are no current issues on the news.

Do you think that the mainstream media take this forum as a relevant place for their source of information? In addition, the number of active users, including all beginners, is several thousand, and the number of registered users is completely irrelevant - here (https://loyce.club/active/7d.html) you can view the statistics for the past 7 days.

I cannot say how many more people visit the forum as guests, but even if it is a few thousand regular visitors, it is still very far from a number that would have a significant impact on some global changes.

No matter how many planned to do so, banks has no right to stop you from withdrawing your funds unless you have a contract with telling that you cannot. That is your money in the first place. But however, this is just a manifestation of worries from what happened. There's no need to pani, just be mindful of your holdings and actions to avoid being a victim of phising sites or fake applications or wallets. Also, not all people would pull their fiat assets to put it in this industry because that will also mean that they have risked those amounts already from the possibility of losng. The idea of OP is there which is to take full accountability of your money. But no matter how you secure it on cold and even physical wallet, if you'd be somehow negligent, it can still be got from you.

The dependecy of CEX will never fade away. No matter how things screed people will use CEX again. How people can resist so much service getting from one place. Its human nature that they wants everything in a easy way and secure way. It's also human nature that they forget their past experience very quickly. So just stop panicking and be more focused on the market.

The heavy dependancy of CEXs will exist as long as fiat currencies exist — which is, pretty much forever. Our only hope is that hopefully the reliance on CEXs will decrease significantly as Bitcoin/crypto adoption growns in the long-term.

I think that as crypto becomes more popular, the popularity of cex will grow. After all, you can exchange any coins there without any commission and use fiat money. For the user, it does not really matter whether it is dex or cex. For him the main thing is convenience. And dex is still very far behind. Especially when the cunning Binance is the monopoly in the industry.

So you're saying nothing changed! Exchanges were never safe, cold storage was always the best to hodl. No need to panic, some people just have to learn the hard way.

If you love your hard earned money, then yes you need to follow these steps. Exchanges were defamed earlier due to the exit scams. This time it wasn’t different also. So yes if you have good amount of Cryptos and really care about it, then at first you should think of moving it to a cold storage or hardware wallet. Electrum will be best according to me, as it’s features and security are great. This suggestion is for everyone present out there. Now to follow or not, it’s completely a user’s choice.

Also, remember we're in a recession, and the last time we had a recession some banks had to get bailed out, and some just collapsed. So, check whether your government covers you for a certain amount of money in a bank account, otherwise I wouldn't trust your bank any more than an exchange, and I'd prefer to have Bitcoin controlled by myself. Most Western countries I believe have some sort of protection for banks going bust. I believe it's either £75,000 or £85,000 in the UK. That's for each bank, unless they're controlled by the same company.

Yes I agree, when I started to buy my crypto this year, I constantly read the recommendations from people here to not store any crypto on an exchange. I made sure to remove my crypto right away but I may not have done it if I didn't read all the people warning about it. This is after I lost 2 bitcoin on the mtgox exchange.

Majority had already been aware about the risk but they cant just resist nor avoid on not to make use of these platforms as we do know that there's no other way specially when you are dealing with fiat

conversions which means that you do really need up these platforms or service for you to do so.One thing is also having that p2p transactions but we cant just really ignore the fact that exchange
service is way more convenient.
Even we do say that lots had already been aware of those sayings but still we do decide and choose up to continue to make use of it.

Bear market affects cryptocurrency market and crypto exchanges. The global recession makes all things worse not only cryptocurrency that means we are in a very bad period in history of Bitcoin. It was created after Goldman Sach collapse and that recession and has grown very strong in the past more than one decade. Now it has to be tested in a first recession in its history.

I agree that withdraw cryptocurrency to own wallet is great but doing the same for fiat currency into bank accounts is bad idea. Banks can be collapsed too and not all users who store their savings in banks will be compensated or compensated in full.

Were people really following the proof of keys event each year this wouldn't have happened, but people are lazy and they always prefer to trust others with their money and security. They're used to knowing that there's someone who knows things better and that person should be doing this or that job for you, the way your plumber or electrician fix stuff around the house. The problem with cryptocurrencies is that once you give it away it belongs to someone else. It's not your car that you can park on someone else's yard and come back later.

I've kept my coins on my computer for the last 8 years and I haven't lost a single satoshi.

The risk involving fiat in exchange's hands is that there is a possibility that the exchange becomes insolvent and your money will remain in their possession when they go down or worse when they run away. In other words there isn't really that much difference in this case between cryptocurrencies and fiat when they are both in your exchange account.

From the beginning we already know that the stock exchange is not a safe place to store assets, but only now have we been preoccupied with this kind of thing. It shouldn't be because FTX or any other exchange is withdrawing assets, but to protect against the eventuality that might happen.
We recommend storing assets in a private wallet, as we have access to store private keys, whereas crypto exchanges are wallets provided by exchanges so the private keys are held by them.

Personal Wallet

• Access is fully controlled by the owner

• The private key is held by itself without being known by other people

• Can do staking and farming through decentralized exchanges

• If the private key is lost, it cannot be used or accessed forever

• Wallet security is the full responsibility of the owner.

Exchange

• If the exchange is hacked, the assets we have have the potential to be lost

• Potential for phishing and personal data leakage

Therefore it's not because of FTX or other exchanges, but this is a step to secure the assets that we have, so it's better to choose a personal wallet compared to the Exchange. As has been said theymos  Re: Reminder: do not keep your money in online accounts (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5421039.0)

As long as you don’t control your money, there’s always a risk on that and that’s why many are rushing to get their hard wallet now because it seems to be the safe option, all you have to do is protect your private keys. Exchanges are not safe even the big one, they are slowly becoming centralized and if the government started to regulate it, you can expect another panic. Store your holdings safely, don’t be a victim of those failed exchanges, i know that feeling and I don’t want to experience it again, buying hard wallet is really worth it.

Honestly I dislike to react to situations by panicking. BUT OP is pretty accurate and his suggestion is very valuable. I was using my money through Binance last year. At least like %90 of my coins were on it. Its dangerous game to play in my opinion. That's why I went with buying Ledger Nano X. Even Binance cannot guarantee my assets will always be safe. I obviously love their "earn" section generating money. I also love to react quickly to ever changing markets. But I feel lot safer since I got my Ledger.

We are fine if we can control our coins and not keep them in the exchanges. I agree with the suggestion from @OP to save it in the cold wallet because that is the safest way to protect our coins from a bad things that can happen with the exchanges. But I am trying not to panic because of much bad news. We need to figure out how to protect our coins. Buying a hardware wallet may help us protect the coins. But you can use an old computer or phone that you don't use and send your coins on that device. You can use the multi wallet to store the coins.

I think this Option is for those who don't trust crypto exchanges. The safest way to store crypto is to keep the currency in a cold wallet. It may not be the most convenient solution, but it is a safe one, given the prevalence of hacks and scams in the world of cryptocurrencies. I think it's a good time to start testing the cold storage and semi-cold storage features found on some popular exchanges and wallets.

The funny thing is I recently was reading a big News org website, might have been CNN or similar but a massive mainstream place front page news I always scan the popular stories to catch general sentiment and they went through the details of somebody caught laundering stolen exchange funds.   It did reference this forum because the person caught posted here and on reddit also; both those places can be relevant when we're talking in terms of billions then it starts be an issue the whole of society might reference somewhere fairly specific even here. 
  In fact this forum is significant and associated with the beginnings of Bitcoin probably forever, I agree most of the population might not realize that but it is the case its relevant for any discussion for crypto historically and probably going forward also.

I agree that this forum is an extremely valuable source of information and a very important part of Bitcoin history, but that the concept of a forum is not something that today's generations are happy to accept. Unfortunately, they seek information and get advice on various social networks where it is much easier to manipulate information, and therefore many have a very distorted image of Bitcoin.

What I tried to say is that it is unlikely that a post on this forum will affect anything important in the sense that it will move millions in a certain direction, as some mainstream media can do. If you look at the proof-of-reserve data published by various CEXs these days, it turns out that millions of BTC are still in their possession, which means that even after everything that happened, most of their users did not react - or they are not telling the truth.

Yes, buying a hardware wallet will definitely save our money and currencies, and it is a good option for those who want to hold their currencies in the long term and not for daily trading, although the hardware wallet is somewhat expensive depending on the model of it that you will buy, your currencies after years will be in a safe place and you will be the only one in control of it, because it will be offline, and if you lose your wallet, you will be able to recover it through recovery phrases, so yes, cold wallets are better than exchange wallets that are vulnerable to hacking at any moment.

Buying a hardware wallet is not a bad option but at the same time since the collapse of the FTX exchange hardware wallet manufactures have reported a huge increase in the demand for their devices, so if you buy one now it is possible they will be unable to meet the demand and you will need to wait for it, and if that is the case you cannot really leave your coins at an exchange as they could collapse during that time, so during that time it would be necessary to use a software wallet to secure your coins.

There’s already a trust issue after what happened to FTX since they prove that if you don’t have keys for that wallet, then your money is not safe at all. Cold storage are advisable for long term investors and those who have huge money, I only trust exchanges for my trading activities, aside from this I’m not using them to store my crypto. Investing on a hard wallet can be more worth it, don’t hesitate to get one especially now.

That's what I've done for a long time before I've acquired my hardware wallet. I've also read it from someone in the forum and found it as a good suggestion.

I did have an old laptop and connected it for a while in the internet so that I can download Electrum and then did the transfers and kept bitcoin on that wallet I've from that laptop and took a long time until I've connected it back again for doing transfers during the bull run.

It's a good alternative but just make sure that you're putting it on a good surface that no one can ever touch it except you.