Two important lesson I learn from this forum this year 2022

[Wiwo]

The lessons I've learned this year are "if you follow the rules, most likely everything would be fine with your and your money". Everything is on the surface, everything is already known, everyone knows "not your keys, not your crypto" rule, yet people still try to trick the system and invent a bicycle from the beginning; and do not fall of a greed victim. Nothing new, but people keep failing and doing same mistakes. People try to outsmart the system, but it impossible to outsmart what has been proven many times with sweat and blood.

I do agree with you, looking at many victims of the system are mainly those who deviate from the set rule of the system as laid down even before they engaged in. It is a capitalist system and as such every mistake by a user is an opportunity for them and the system isn't made for your best interest , so it's best since we can't avoid it entirely we all tread with great caution knowing the risk that's involved.

Centralization has become the order of the day, and in as much as we want to remain decentralized we can't do away with centralized services but the ultimate thing to do is, not to trust them even though there are documents showing their trusted and other insurance to cover the cost for payback customer balance whenever and however. Exchanges like Binance and others like crashed FTX all have such documents but yet FTX filed for bankruptcy and walked away with investors, and money. This is the major disadvantage of centralized service, not your keys, not your wallet they have the sole right to do whatever their wish with your money without your concept. So in totality, one needs to trade with high concentrations and deal at a minimal risk level.

[AakZaki]

Exchange market can't guarantee with trusted place for saving assets after FTX exchange collapse, I think another exchange just waiting moment become crash and collapse like FTX exchange. I agree with you without hold assets in exchange market but for daily trader can't for holding assets in hardware wallet. I am thinking about with my local exchange will collapse like FTX exchange because almost my assets holding in local exchange market.

I aware when holding assets in hardware wallet because want to earn daily day profit take longer time for withdrawing and deposit fund from exchange to hardware wallet or on the contrary.

currently, an important topic in crypto is about trust, user trust is finally undermined by the FTX event which of course has a significant impact on crypto, not only from the price but the level of trust in centralized markets eventually decreases. Storing on a centralized exchange won't be safe either. As a day trader making regular withdrawals to a personal wallet it would be better than having to hold them on a centralized exchange

[Piesel]

Exchange market can't guarantee with trusted place for saving assets after FTX exchange collapse, I think another exchange just waiting moment become crash and collapse like FTX exchange. I agree with you without hold assets in exchange market but for daily trader can't for holding assets in hardware wallet. I am thinking about with my local exchange will collapse like FTX exchange because almost my assets holding in local exchange market.

I aware when holding assets in hardware wallet because want to earn daily day profit take longer time for withdrawing and deposit fund from exchange to hardware wallet or on the contrary.

currently, an important topic in crypto is about trust, user trust is finally undermined by the FTX event which of course has a significant impact on crypto, not only from the price but the level of trust in centralized markets eventually decreases. Storing on a centralized exchange won't be safe either. As a day trader making regular withdrawals to a personal wallet it would be better than having to hold them on a centralized exchange

Cryptocurrency is originally designed to be trustless and the presence of trust in form of third parties is what has resulted in the bad experiences in the cryptocurrency industry today, FTX have delt a heavy blow to many investors, and businesses who trusted the exchange with their funds.

Buy the good news is that, everyone will recover from this incident eventually but we can never forget the lesson this incident has thought us, never to trust third parties with our money.

Centralized exchange should not be trusted just like we can't trust the banks and other investment platforms around the market, best you hold your coins in your wallet

[nurilham]

Investing in altcoins is just too risky, some people have traded altcoins and realize good profits and many traded and loss all they had. Altcoins is good for experience traders that can take the risk to invest or trade on it, I don't think it is proper for young investors to consider to invest in altcoins because of to make good profits.  People take the risk of investing altcoins for greed to get quick money,  the probability of not having good trade and investment in altcoin is very high. During this bear market many altcoins could not not survive the bear market.  Bitcoin is the most reliable and trusted for investment.

Actually, not all altcoins have the same risks. Top altcoins are a bit safe for investment, both for old and young investors. Just consider the top altcoins like ETH, BNB, MATIC, SOL, TRX, ADA, or DOT if you don't want to take a too high risk. Only new altcoins, meme coins, or altcoins with weak fundamentals are not recommended to invest for young investors, it has a big risk and is hard to predict their future. New investors who have less experience will be difficult to know the price fluctuation of these types of altcoins, their prices sometimes are easily dumped and pumped. This may lead to losing big money although there is a chance to gain big profits as well.

[JoyMarsha]

There are numerous lessons I've learned just from this year alone about crypto. Even the king of the crypto future(bitcoin) cannot be assured or guarded in this life. Nobody genuinely knows what will affect cryptocurrency in general tomorrow. It is best to not depend on exchange for your crypto assets. Don't keep your cryptocurrency assets in an exchange or crypto wallet indefinitely; instead, do anything you wish with them on time when there are profits to your investment. But don't store them in an exchange or crypto wallet forever. Hoping that nothing can happen to your crypto assets. Hackers are into crypto day and night, working tirelessly to hack into our crypto assets on an exchange or crypto wallets

[CryptoHeadlineNews]

So I am led to the conclusion that, cryptocurrency is not the problem, but centralization and the human factors are the major set back in the young fast-growing cryptocurrency industry

Yes,  I so much agree with your point of view, because the only problem cryptocurrency has today is centralized exchanges and human factors such as "greed", because its only greed that can make man want to hack/steal other peoples money worth millions of dollars, and likewise, only through the help of a centralized exchanges can all these be made possible, simply because users has no control over funds in a centralized exchange wallet

[AakZaki]

Cryptocurrency is originally designed to be trustless and the presence of trust in form of third parties is what has resulted in the bad experiences in the cryptocurrency industry today, FTX have delt a heavy blow to many investors, and businesses who trusted the exchange with their funds.

Buy the good news is that, everyone will recover from this incident eventually but we can never forget the lesson this incident has thought us, never to trust third parties with our money.

Centralized exchange should not be trusted just like we can't trust the banks and other investment platforms around the market, best you hold your coins in your wallet

recover or not depending on how they can hold and manage the assets they have. during a bearish market like today, of course, all assets will experience a decline, but you won't lose if you don't sell them. Hold on and keep believing the bull market is coming soon.

And trust is important, if trust has been violated then there is no place for other beliefs. The Centralized Exchange is only a place to trade, not to be the main repository.

[Kasabus]

So I am led to the conclusion that, cryptocurrency is not the problem, but centralization and the human factors are the major set back in the young fast-growing cryptocurrency industry

Yes,  I so much agree with your point of view, because the only problem cryptocurrency has today is centralized exchanges and human factors such as "greed", because its only greed that can make man want to hack/steal other peoples money worth millions of dollars, and likewise, only through the help of a centralized exchanges can all these be made possible, simply because users has no control over funds in a centralized exchange wallet

Right. Centralized exchanges safety to use is never a guarantee in the long run. Not only because we are still in doubt with KYC, but mainly because these exchanges could motivate those greedy people to steal the possessions of the users through hacking. And with these present threats, there’s no need to fall for any centralized exchange and just save our own money in our own private wallet. That way, we are in control of our money, and hacking is extremely not possible.

[Anguwa]

As 2022 is almost coming to an end and haven't been around this forum for a couple of months now, I have learn two vital lessons this year that will guide my journey in the cryptocurrency space.
THE TWO LESSONS
1: I will never trust an exchange, most especially centralized exchanges e.g FTX Binance, etc.
2: never n trust any other coin aside from Bitcoin for long-term goals, most especially the highly centralized altcoin as there are open to external influence just like centralized exchanges are also exposed to external influence.
So I am led to the conclusion that, cryptocurrency is not the problem, but centralization and the human factors are the major set back in the young fast-growing cryptocurrency industry

Yes, centralized exchanges are the main issue, as they are the root of all the issues that are causing the bear market to last longer. When people heard about FTX, they panicked and sold all of their Bitcoin, which is why the price of the currency is still falling. If we can all avoid these exchanges, we can all enjoy Bitcoin and learn about the technology behind it because there will be a significant price increase that will benefit us all.

[Ziskinberg]

1: I will never trust an exchange, most especially centralized exchanges e.g FTX Binance, etc.

Despite what happened with FTX, my trust remains in Binance but of course, leaving funds in them is not the thing we do, never.

It was not the right thing to say "we never trust an exchange" because they are also the ones who make this crypto market alive. If that will happen, who will be trusted? Because I say that the use of exchange to make a trade is the safest way. If we are not trusting any of them, then I think there is no reason as well to stay in crypto.

[Alisha-k]

Centralisation should forever be voted out whenever the opportunity to speak on freedom and liberty of funds arises. Cryptocurrency started as a cool p2p transaction before third-party exchanges came to make the worst out of it and every year this CEX gets more complicated and involved of bankruptcy or hacked. I have learnt that if i must own Bitcoin i should be my own bank decentralisation cannot be compromised for any reason.

[erep]

Yes, centralized exchanges are the main issue, as they are the root of all the issues that are causing the bear market to last longer. When people heard about FTX, they panicked and sold all of their Bitcoin, which is why the price of the currency is still falling. If we can all avoid these exchanges, we can all enjoy Bitcoin and learn about the technology behind it because there will be a significant price increase that will benefit us all.

We should not be advised to have long-term assets on a centralized exchange because we do not have full control of the assets in that exchange, when they change the withdrawal algorithm from automatic to manual confirmation then withdrawing funds from the exchange will be delayed until the team approves it, so avoid centralized exchange activity one with a low reputation and better to have a hard wallet to store long term assets than trusting staking from an exchange offering which carries a high risk of losing funds.

[CryptopreneurBrainboss]

Despite what happened with FTX, my trust remains in Binance but of course, leaving funds in them is not the thing we do, never.

It was not the right thing to say "we never trust an exchange" because they are also the ones who make this crypto market alive.

Why do people always think this, the ones making the industry alive is you and me and not the centralized platforms that cares nothing about the industry but only wants to enriched themselves. I bet people would had thought FTX gives a fuck about them too (the customers) but what they didn't realize was that FTX was just making use of their money to enriched themselves. Reports just came out that FTX wasn't selling any real Bitcoin to their customers and I won't be surprised if that's what is happening in other centralized exchange as well.

This guys are just displaying virtual representation of coins which is why when there's a massive withdrawal pressure, they paused withdrawals as they don't have the liquidity they claim to have. No centralized service providers should be trusted irrespective of how genuine you think they're. Binance is one of the worst and should be approached (used) with caution that's if you aren't comfortable with other alternative because when Binance will collapses, the impact will be more catastrophic than FTX was.

[Ojima-ojo]

Despite what happened with FTX, my trust remains in Binance but of course, leaving funds in them is not the thing we do, never.

It was not the right thing to say "we never trust an exchange" because they are also the ones who make this crypto market alive.

Why do people always think this, the ones making the industry alive is you and me and not the centralized platforms that cares nothing about the industry but only wants to enriched themselves. I bet people would had thought FTX gives a fuck about them too (the customers) but what they didn't realize was that FTX was just making use of their money to enriched themselves. Reports just came out that FTX wasn't selling any real Bitcoin to their customers and I won't be surprised if that's what is happening in other centralized exchange as well.

This guys are just displaying virtual representation of coins which is why when there's a massive withdrawal pressure, they paused withdrawals as they don't have the liquidity they claim to have. No centralized service providers should be trusted irrespective of how genuine you think they're. Binance is one of the worst and should be approached (used) with caution that's if you aren't comfortable with other alternative because when Binance will collapses, the impact will be more catastrophic than FTX was.

I can bet you that 99% of centralized exchange don't have the liquidy their claim and if going by recent events I the industry have further exposed the scam operation of some too-centralized platformers truth is I don't trust any of them with my bitcoin, all I use them for is for a small transaction that will not even make up to $1000 and I make sure I transfer my balance to my wallet.

Most of the CEOs of centralized platforms are using customer money for personal use, reports from investigations revealed that FTX CEOs transferred billion of dollars from the company account for personal use.

[Mpamaegbu]

The biggest problem is that we have introduced third parties and Centralization over an ecosystem that requires no trust and no third parties to function.

In fact I believe it is not a bad thing to build centralized services on top of a decentralized system and they actually provide some benefits too. For example the payment processors give merchants the option to receive bitcoin and convert it to fiat very easily and vice versa. Or centralized/custodial wallets (even government controlled wallets like Chivo) allow absolute newbies with no technical understanding to still use bitcoin.

P.S. I myself started my journey from a web wallet...

Centralization isn't the problem per se. It's the criminals who run those shit that have made it look that way. If anything, centralization even opened cryptocurrencies to the world rapidly. Many people would've been locked out of knowing how and where to buy from. I dabbled into cryptos with a huge puzzle of what it was dangling over my head at the time. Creating a wallet or opening an exchange account wasn't even as easy as they seem today. I wonder what it would've been like five years before I did. Today, many people think it's as easy as ABC. Talking about Cexs, no matter what, we've to acknowledge the good it has done us. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the warning should be "investors shouldn't leave their cryptos on exchanges while traders should find a way of not leaving much there." To face reality, there's no way we tell traders not to leave funds on exchanges and it turns out fine. Except they aren't traders in the real sense of it.

[Peanutswar]

In the first part the purpose of the exchange is to have us opportunity to buy an asset or a specific coin that's all and this is not built up to use as your wallet many people do this because they trust the exchange it will not get scam them and let their funds hold in these exchange still ideal to hold your coin where you have a fully authorization with it like the hot or cold wallets. NEVER store your coins in an exchange. In the second part, it depends on how you make research a particular coin like how it circulates and if this is ideal for the long term or not. They want to chase bitcoin but they can't follow it still, crypto is a risk, you risk a new coin with a possible big loss or big return.

[Bhig Daddy]

It is absolutely true that you utilize them, but not fully, if you trust the exchange. When you trade, only deposit the money you'll need for trading. Nothing more.
You may also say that you're not required to follow any well-known figures who share their industry observations. similar to the usual situation when a well-known person advises him on what to do and the media makes a big deal out of it. Many people made the mistake of believing those, which was wrong.

[8rch7]

We can't claimed what happen with FTX exchange after becoming scam or collapse will happen with other bigger exchange market, I think some people here have misunderstanding their decision with all exchange market is not safety for saving assets. I believe with many potential exchange market trusted and can exist for longer time like Binance, Kucoin and Huobi.

Although can't guarantee with above exchange market have chance the same cases like FTX, I think Binance is most trusted exchange right now after transparent fund back up publishing. Exchange market is very important for the sustainability of cryptocurrency, if some one have less confidence level with Exchange market I can't imagine how to sell our cryptocurrency assets later.

[RILWAN]

One of the point I always mention to people is never to trust an exchange with your fund, ones you have to perform a transaction on the exchange, you should move you coins out to a personal wallet, and as a newbie am glad you already realize this mistake and have taken steps to avoid getting caught in the web of exchange manipulation and scam.

[Distinctin]

You a very right, it is easier said than done since it is easy to write than to practice.

But as far as I know, it is better for a newbie to concentrate on Bitcoin other than altcoin since the rate of volatility between the two is with a wide gap.

As you said, altcoins have done more harm than good so ultimately we will need to stay away from such high-risk investments most especially as a newbie in the crypto market.2

Of course you are right, but in the market bitcoin is not the only asset that can generate profits. Volatility also exists with bitcoin due to supply and demand factors, actually I can say that ETH tends to have almost the same volatility as bitcoin so if your goal of investing in crypto is to make a profit then bitcoin is the one.

Volatility shouldn't be the best reason why you would choose bitcoin over altcoins as an investment asset. I tend to think of its use cases as a currency, its adoption as a means of payment, and the security of your funds with your keys as some of the advantages of why bitcoin is the best among other crypto assets.

I believe we are investing because we have seen their potentials to be profitable, and by having real utility cases that become more visible especially when hold for long term, then definitely those coins are the one we should focus on investing. While others have fallen on altcoins, I believe bitcoin has even more potentials to succeed and become profitable, not only because of its utility cases, but also because the bitcoin community has constantly proven it.