People like to say you can be anonymous and have security. I would like to believe this but recently I have had to deal with something that shows me no matter how secure you think your Crypto is unless you have your money in a secured and people-backed wallet there is no way of knowing your funds are actually secure or not.
I am bringing this up because I have been saving the Crypto I earn and putting it on a hardware wallet. SecuX to be exact. I have been putting money onto it here and there from my earning sites. It has been about a week or two since I checked my wallet. I decided to check it today and when I open it all of my funds have been sent out to random addresses. Whoever did this also put 1 XLM in my wallet as kind of a screw you, I guess. I had around $250 on this hardware wallet. No one has ever seen the passphrase and I wrote it down in one spot and one spot only. This makes me wonder how this could have happened? Was my wallet compromised somehow from my computer? Why was the wallet compromised before I even bought it? How would something like this happen to a wallet that is supposed to be one of the securest wallets out there?
I have no idea why this happened or even how this happened. I like to think I go above and beyond when I am storing my money. Somewhere along the way I left my guard down and allowed a vulnerability in.
This is what scares me about decentralization. If your funds are stolen from your personal little bank account then there is nothing you can do about it. Since my funds were taken from my hardware wallet and sent to a wallet somewhere across the world, in a wallet not connected to anyone, and then sifted through multiple other wallets. I am guaranteed to never see that money again.
I believe in Crypto and the power it has to change the world. I just do not understand how something like this could happen.
I decided to move my money over in case the wallet I was using gets hacked. It is funny how things like that work sometimes. I was scared to lose my money so I sent it to a wallet I thought was the most secure out there. I would have been better off leaving in the wallet I already knew was secure.
We talk about being decentralized and not needing banks but what happens when your funds are stolen from you. There is no way for you to get them back. Now say if your funds were in a wallet like Coinbase then you have the possibility of catching this before it happens and there are so many fail-safes on wallets like Coinbase.
I was furious at first and all I could think of was how long it took me to make that money but then I realized that life will always have these trials and tribulations. It is the way you react and what you do about it that defines you. I did not let this break me. I am letting this build me up and push me to learn new ways of earning and new ways of storing my Crypto.
These are the types of things we need to share with each other to let each other know how un-secure our digital money really is. All together I have lost $500. $250 for the SecuX because I am too afraid to use it again and also the $250 the random person stole from me in BTC, LTC, and BCH.
I am sure this is my fault somewhere along the way. This makes me wonder though what else of mine has been compromised.
The main thing I want to go over is security is key when storing any form of currency. How secure are these Hardware wallets we are putting our savings into? Is it just this easy to steal Crypto from someone?
What really gets to me is I was planning on moving over more today. I am so glad they took my funds when they did. Now I will not continuously keep losing money. Now any more money I have will be going to other more secure wallets.
I used to think I wanted to be anonymous and do my own thing. Now I know that I want to have that security feeling a bank gives me when I put my money into my savings account. I think at the moment people that are small like me need to be putting the money they earn into more well-known wallets like Coinbase. You can get your passphrase and also set up extra security measures.
Is decentralization what we need? Or are we headed down a dark path and once we arrive at our destination we will have no one there to try to recover funds or watch our back? I know everyone hates banks and people want their money to be there's but when do we cross the line and lose that security we have with traditional banks.
These are the times you start questioning what is really best for the future. I hope that we can have security and anonymity but it is starting to be clear that security kind of goes out the window when you are dealing with funds anonymously.
I hope you have enjoyed my article. Please like and follow for more content and to help me grow on my Crypto Journey.
Lead image by Unsplash (Edited by HattyHats)
