Don't use custodian services; remember, not your keys, not your crypto.
I have noticed something particular, especially among new users, and many of those new users are receiving free tips. Still, they are storing those free tips on custodian wallets or services. If you are reading this article and using custodian wallets to save your satoshis, please do yourself a favor and stop doing that and create your wallet.
Many new users brag about putting their satoshis in services like Nexo, which pays interest on your holdings. Those services are custodian services, and if they lose your satoshis to a hacker, you will lose your precious cryptocurrencies, and whatever good you are gaining won't be enough to cover your losses. Bitcoin Cash is a fixed supply coin, and as such, it doesn't give any interest. The interest Nexo is offering you is because they are lending your satoshis or because they are playing trading games with your money.
Others put their precious tips into services like Binance, thinking they are a wallet. Binance is not a wallet. It is an exchange, and you should only have your funds in those services because you will exchange your assets for something else. Once you are done trading, you should always move your investments outside the exchange control into your wallet. If you leave your tips and satoshis on Binance, you are putting your money at unnecessary risk because if Binance gets hacked, your funds will be gone forever.
Leaving your satoshis sitting on a wallet where you don't control the private keys is asking for trouble in the future. Services that pay interest, like Nexo, have disappeared in the past because they lost the users' funds to a hacker or because it was a pyramid scheme from the beginning. If you want to exchange your Bitcoin Cash that you get from tips for something else, by all means, send your free BCH to Binance, but once you are done trading, send your assets to your wallet, where you have your private keys.
Failing to create your wallet may result in the loss of all of your funds, and exchanges are, in large, an accumulation of assets. A service like Nexo is prompt for a hacker to attack because a hacker has the incentive of many funds sitting in one place. A straightforward hack, and the hacker gets a juicy reward and runs with everybody else's funds, and you are left with nothing.
Genuine wallets to control your keys are wallets like Bitcoin.com, Electron Cash, and Ledger hardware wallets. The wallets that give you 12 or 24 seed word phrases are the wallets that you should have in other to save your satoshis. You should only use custodian services when you exchange into different assets or exchange for fiat. You can even use decentralized exchanges to exchange crypto to crypto and crypto to stable coins.
If you lose your precious satoshis because you left your satoshis sitting on a custodian's wallet or your satoshis because you didn't store your private keys accurately, it will be your fault. But if you must use custodian services, well, at least know that you have been warned not to. But if you must to because you don't understand how to do it on your own, first go and try to study and learn, and if possible, use only custodian services that have been around the longest, that being Coinbase and Gemini only.
Another custodian service is Wallet of Satoshi, Strike, and many others, which are supposed to be wallets, but they are not; they are services or banks that store your funds for you, and those services can be hacked too, and you could end up losing your funds as well. Many Bitcoiners will have you believe that using Wallet of Satoshi is using Lightning Network. It is not they are deceiving you; if you don't control your channel and private keys, those satoshis are not yours but are your custodian property. Once again, a custodian service is just another bank.
Bitcoiners are deceiving the whole world by thinking to new users that custodian services like Strike are the same as using Lightning Network. It is not they are deceiving you because they don't want new users to find out that to use the real LN, people must first open channels and close them later, which will incur an on-chain fee, which makes LN redundant right away, and useless if you are trying to save on costs. Pretty much LN is vaporware and a fee extraction tool.
