Are Contrarian Trading Options of Cryptocurrency Safe?

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The rapid growth in cryptocurrency trading has ballooned in recent months, owing largely to high volatility and increased trading volumes. Among traders, the traditional options for trading crypto entail registering at a cryptocurrency exchange, depositing Bitcoin or Altcoin, purchasing your preferred digital asset, and deciding how best to store it. Several options abound, notably hardware […]

The rapid growth in cryptocurrency trading has ballooned in recent months, owing largely to high volatility and increased trading volumes. Among traders, the traditional options for trading crypto entail registering at a cryptocurrency exchange, depositing Bitcoin or Altcoin, purchasing your preferred digital asset, and deciding how best to store it. Several options abound, notably hardware wallets and software wallets, both of which require private keys. These are your password to your crypto holdings, should you prefer to store them off the cryptocurrency exchange.

 

Many of the exchanges out there are unlicensed, and unregulated, given that crypto is a novel technology which has yet to pass the litmus test of regulators around the world. This leaves traders with no option but to trust many of these exchanges, despite their misgivings. Fortunately, if all of this sounds like a crapshoot, it may well be that you are better off avoiding unregulated exchanges, and opting for fully licensed operations.

 

Try www.mansioncasino.com in South Africa as an effective way to enjoy volatility in your real money selections. This operator is fully licensed and regulated by the authorities in S.A, as well as the industry leader, the United Kingdom Gambling Commission (UKGC). It also complies with the standards set by industry-leading authorities such as 18+, Thawte, GBGA, and IBAS.

Over the years, a plethora of crypto exchanges have suffered major hacks, including the following:

 

  • Mount Gox – $460 million stolen between 2013 and 2014
  • Coincheck – $534.8 million stolen from 260,000+ investors in 2018
  • Bitfinex – $72 million stolen in 2016, when 119,756 Bitcoins went missing.
  • BitGrail – $195 million stolen in February 2018 with the disappearance of 17 million Nano.
  • ZAIF – $60 million stolen in 2018 in a hot wallet attack. Coins included MonaCoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Bitcoin.
  • NiceHash – $50 million stolen when 4,736 Bitcoin disappeared in 2017.
  • Bithumb – $31.5 million stolen from the Korean exchange.
  • Coinrail – $40 million stolen, including NPXS tokens and Tron.

 

This begs the question: where is it safest to buy and store cryptocurrency, if at all? Not surprisingly, there is an unmitigated fortune of crypto floating around in cyberspace, unable to be claimed at all. The owners of this crypto have lost their private keys to their digital currency wallets, and cannot ever access their crypto holdings no matter what. The New York Times inked an article – Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes. Experts anticipate that as much as 20% – $140 billion + worth of Bitcoins alone cannot ever be claimed, given that the private keys are lost forever.

Should You HODL Crypto?

This makes it highly risky to buy and sell digital currencies and HODL them over the long-term. If the hardware wallet passwords and private keys are lost, it can be impossibly difficult to ever access the crypto holdings again. This differs tremendously from fiduciary currency like GBP, USD, JPY, and the like with accounts held in banks. Banks as intermediaries – are custodians of your money and will happily oblige with password assistance, if you provide I.D. The decentralised nature of Bitcoins and other crypto means that there is no central authority to approach if you lose personal, sensitive information. You are basically on your own, lost at sea.

 

Other options that have gone mainstream in recent years include crypto CFD trading. Contracts for Difference are readily available at leading brokerages, many of which are fully licensed and regulated by respected authorities around the world. A CFD contract does not confer ownership of the underlying financial instrument, in this case the cryptocurrency. Rather, the CFDs allow clients to trade the bullish or bearish price movements of the underlying financial instrument by way of a contract. As a derivatives trading instrument, CFDs are incredibly popular in Commonwealth countries, particularly England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland.