The Quadriga CX scandal is a reminder of how important properly cold-storing your own crypto is.
The advent of cryptocurrencies brought with it a paradigm shift in the way we think about money. Instead of relying on a government-issued currency that is stored and kept track of at a centralized bank, cryptocurrencies rely upon mathematics and computers for creation, distribution, and storage of value. They greatly reduce the inevitable corruption that occurs within highly centralized money systems and transfer responsibility to the individual as opposed to some other organization. With this responsibility comes control, power over corrupt organizations, and peace of mind. Peace of mind in that the individual knows their money cannot be tampered with, stolen or devalued due to malevolent practices often exercised by banks and governments.
Unfortunately, within the cryptocurrency space, we have become comfortable and trusting of centralized exchanges which are the exact same thing as a traditional bank. They are prone to fraud, manipulation, hacks, and corruption. Mount Gox, Coincheck, and the recent Quadriga CX scandal are stark reminders of this. In the most recent scandal, the CEO of Quadriga CX was supposedly the only individual with access to all user funds on the platform and when he mysteriously died, all of the funds were lost forever. Maybe he did really die, but maybe he didn’t and is relaxing on a beach somewhere with hundreds of millions of dollars of stolen user funds. Regardless, if no user kept funds on this exchange and cold-stored them properly, they would have no power over the user and could not lose/steal funds.
Centralized exchanges own your private keys and thus own your cryptocurrency. This completely defeats the purpose of cryptocurrencies. Taking the extra steps to properly cold-store cryptocurrencies empowers the individual and keeps them as far away as possible from bad actors. All it takes is generating private keys offline, away from the internet and storing these private keys on a USB drive. Money is how the superpowers of the world enslave the masses. If everyone in the world bought bitcoin and properly cold stored them, it would absolutely decimate every corrupt government and bank in the world. Help the human species reach its full, unbounded potential, and cold store your crypto.
