Reminder: Your funds are NOT safe in third-party wallets

[Pmalek]

I have heard users saying they keep funds on wallets on exchanges because they are involved in daily trading. They don't feel like moving the funds out because they are afraid to miss a good opportunity. During the time it takes to deposit the funds and them being credited into your account one could miss the window to make profit. This is understandable but still dangerous due to the many hacking incidents that several exchanges have experienced.

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[DdmrDdmr]

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Another possible scenario for keeping some assets on an exchange is due to the aggregate amount being small, and the withdrawal fees representative in relation to the amounts held at the exchange. Additionally, some of the assets may not be exportable to the current user’s wallets, and would require installing specific wallets for some of those assets. Also, on occasions, the withdraws have associated limitations (i.e. minimum amounts).

These factors should not be an obstacle when the assets on the exchange add up to a fair share, but as I said, for smaller amounts they may lead one to leave them there for not being worth the hassle/withdrawl cost.

[kingpin4321]

Generally if your funds are not in your wallet you are at a risk no matter where your funds are.
Always apply caution when it come with your funds

[Hivalley]

Enough cannot be said on this issue really and for sure people will still leave their coins on exchanges for reasons ranging from convenience to cost of transaction fees, moving the coins in and out.
Really there are trusted exchanges, and one can afford to trust to a certain extent, but even though,leaving coins in there could be risky, but yet understandable
When it becomes foolish is when you leave your coins in an exchange that's yet to gain any sort of ground in the cryptocurrency world, then the risk is more and it's best you move them either to your wallet or exchanges with the best form of security

[jseverson]

Nothing is ever 100% safe, even with your private keys hidden someone can physically attack you and torture you until you give them up.  In some cases people feel safer with a 3rd party.  Not everyone wants to be their own bank.

As much as this is true, feel safer != safer. I get that a lot of people would prefer to use centralized services for peace of mind/convenience, but that's exactly what these kinds of posts advocate against. These third parties are taking over the responsibility of taking care of your coins for you, yes, but in the event that you lose your coins, you'll find that most of them would say that it's not their responsibility. If they're not going to do anything in case of losses, and they're the least secure of all safekeeping options, what's the point?

Not everyone wants to be their own bank, but not many of them know that it's easy. People can do whatever they want at the end of the day, but I feel that it's important for them to know the implications of their actions.

[CryptoInsights]

This is probably among the most basic things which anyone that uses cryptocurrencies should know, if it's not in your personal wallet it's not yours yet, as simple as that, but surprisingly enough there are actually people that really think that their tokens/coins are totally safe in exchanges, if you ask those people why are they so sure and feel safe, most of them will probably just say because they trust the exchange or something like that.

Seems to me some people tend to forget previous incidents regarding exchanges getting hacked rather quickly, BitGrail hack that during the incident millions of XRB(Rebranded and known as nano now) got removed from their wallet and the cryptopia hack that happened recently and it wasn't even this exchange's first time that experienced an incident like this and then again people trusted this exchange enough to keep their funds on there, why would anyone trust an exchange with all those previous fishy incidents (like the time when they were having something around 1 month or even more for a simple withdarawal action) and such really?

I'm not talking about the amount that you are trading daily or weekly obviously, this is about medium/long term holds, the tokens, coins or even stable coins that you're not going to exchange them anytime soon, so just don't go ahead and put your life savings on exchanges and use them as a bank no matter how trusted and reputable that exchange is, you can only use your personal wallet (preferably offline) as some kind of a bank, even if we assume that one exchange is really trusted and they're not going to go offline the next hour or tomorrow there's still a chance (even if it's really low) that the exchange that is trusted by you and many others just gets hacked and all your funds on there goes poof.

All Custodial Exchanges hold private key on your behalf which means that the wallet is no longer yours. Thus it is always better to use non-custodial exchange.

Few tips to self guard your funds:

• Use hardware wallets to store your funds. Few good hardware wallets are Trezor, Ladger nano S
• Do not leave your funds in Exchange
• Use non-custodial Exchange to buy or trade. Few good Non-custodial Exchanges are: Changelly.com, CoinSwitch.co, Shapeshift etc.,
• Try to use a separate phone to manage 2FA and keep it offline
• Double check the address before you click on transfer. As  there are malwares that change the address.

Please add if I missed few points.