There is a lot of excitement in the cryptocurrency market right now. Both bitcoin and ethereum are approaching your previous all-time high prices that were set earlier this year. Not only that, but the launch of the Bitcoin ETF has a lot of people thinking that this market is about to accelerate upwards. We have at some point all imagined where we thought the prices of our favorite coins will go, but when those predictions actually become reality; this is something that many of us still aren't prepared for.
When I say not prepared, I am talking about us taking the steps needed to protect ourselves during the times of extreme FOMO. For many of you this will be the first time that you experience the market going parabolic. And I do believe that what happened earlier this year will be nothing compared to where we are going. When this extreme level of FOMO does set it, it becomes much easier to make mistakes. Mistakes that you might not have made during the boring days of little to no price action. It is my hope that this reminder of basic information will help someone from losing everything. With the way this market is moving and where it is going; losing everything now could be something that haunts you forever.
The first thing you need to take care of is securing your bitcoin, ethereum and other cryptocurrency. You need to know where it is and protect it at all costs. What was once a small amount of money can quickly become something substantial during bull runs and you need to treat your funds with that in mind. This could mean taking self-custody and puttying your crypto on a ledger and maintaining your own keys. It could mean taking your funds off exchanges that you don't have a lot of trust in and moving it to exchanges that you do trust. Especially if you don't trust yourself to be able to take self-custody. It also could mean choosing where you lend your cryptocurrency and much of your portfolio that you decide to end up lending out. While some exchanges and lending companies offer insurance on your crypto, many others do not. The amount of exchanges that have been hacked with the funds being drained is a list that has grown quite long. There is also no guarantee in the safety of your funds on lending services. If you do decide to take self-custody of your own coins, be very careful about how you store your own keys and passwords. I cannot stress this enough. For example; a few years ago I had a few dollars worth of Cardano on a wallet that I had forgotten about. Fast forward to today and those few dollars worth of Cardano is now worth hundreds of dollars. Thankfully I was able to recover the wallet. While you may not miss a few dollars missing, almost everyone would miss hundreds of dollars going missing. We hear those kinds of stories all the time. The market is so young that we will continue to see those stories. We often don't know what we really have until they have become something much more. You don't want to have regrets, so just be careful and treat all of your crypto as a treasure.
The next basic type of advice that I will be giving is simply to not give into the FOMO. What I mean by that is that when the prices are going up everyday; it will begin to feel like you can do no wrong. This is when we hear stories of people taking loans out to buy crypto, or going heavy on using leverage to trade and many other high risk activities. Things will become very volatile up and down and there will be people who bet more than they can afford to lose, and they will get RECKT and lose everything. Just like above, it will be something that will haunt many people for years. This means you need to make your plan right now. Some people will decide that they will just let their crypto ride and wait until the bear market begins before they start buying again. That is fine for those people, but there is always a chance that this market might be different than previous market cycles. With the adoption by corporations and countries this bull market may be much more bullish, and longer than usual. No one knows for certain. Personally, I am in this market for the long-term and so I continue to dollar-cost-average no matter what the price is. While crypto prices may feel very expensive at the moment, in my opinion they are quite cheap, especially for where we are heading towards,
The last piece of advice that I want to remind people is that it is okay to sell and take profits. Many people hold on to the idea that they should be in this market forever and that they should never sell, or that the market will go up forever. During 2017/18 there are a lot of people who were up a lot of money with their crypto, and ended up not selling. They believed that the prices would go higher. As we all know, the market tanked. A lot of these people held altcoins that still to this day haven't matched their previous high. These people either bought him and sold low, or are still holding and waiting to get back what they had. If you denominate your value in dollars, you haven't actually made profits until you cash out. Until then, you only have paper profits.
Like I said before, none of these points are earth shattering, but they may help someone out there. It's always a good idea to fine-tune our security, coin custody and planning before the rally begins. This could be your last chance.
How about you? Do you keep your coins on exchanges or take self-custody? Do you have any other tips for people to remember?
As always, thank you for reading!
All very good and sound advice, but something does strike me often times when I read about all of these steps and measures to protect one's crypto, and that is that when it comes to fiat my money is mostly ALWAYS secure as opposed to sometimes secure.
It seems to me there are too many ways in crypto for money to simply vanish, and if crypto wants to be the currency of the future, it is going to have to work very hard to fix that. Because to my mind this is a disadvantage over fiat. Not an advantage.
I could be off my rocker, but that's just my two cents.