If there were any Gold Rusher’s of 49 left around to tell you. You could mine Gold but it was hard t keep it. The Gold rush was swamped not only with miners but with bandits, from bushwhackers to saloon card sharps that would steal your money. Nearly 200 years later in Crypto, it’s the same old story.
There is no point in investing if you are doomed to be robbed of your gains. Bitcoin-maxis think tax is robbery, but the risk is actual robbery seems almost as inevitable.
Back when I got into Crypto, you could merrily sail around the internet looking for new projects and connect your wallet to them in the blissful innocence that nothing bad will happen to you. These days the opposite is true. Here is a jaw dropping example.
You can go on to Google, if you are unlucky enough, and type Crypto DEX and get an advert from Google and when you go to that site and connect your wallet, you will be robbed. That’s right Google will have served you the website of a criminal who under the umbrella of trust in Googles AdSense system, will seize the contents of your wallet.
Of course you do not have to be robbed via Google there are a never-ending list of ways to be victimised but this example is a clear proof of how extremely dangerous the Crypto environment is. It is the so called ‘dark forest’ filled with Criminals on the constant look out for victims. Post anything on X (formerly called Twitter) and the criminals will immediately start to reach out to you to try and scam you. Talk about ‘customer service,’ no corporation responds at the light speed of the criminals in Crypto when you show up on places like X/Twitter. It is not hours or days to respond, its seconds for the Crypto muggers.
So the problem becomes, how can you explore crypto, when connecting your wallet to a Web3 site can lead to your wallet being emptied? It means if you do not have a solution, but you do have funds, anything new is too risky to connect to. It is getting ridiculous. Without being about to connect a wallet safely, it means Crypto is dead for you. If you see a new site that has a great product idea, you simply cannot connect to it for fear of being mugged. You don’t have to be reading about crypto for long to see that every week there are robberies of a scale that beggars anything in the previous history of felony.
So here is a tip, that goes a long way to reopen Crypto for you.
Have a burner wallet.
That is to say, have an address with a little crypto in it, with which you try unproven sites. When it gets robbed, delete it and start a new one.
Do not believe in the idea of a ‘cold wallet,’ there is no such thing, the only cold wallet is one where the keys are lost. As such you have to treat all wallets as if they are vulnerable and you have to segment your funds in a maintainable way and only expose wallets with immaterial assets in them or funds that are passing through.
Security is without doubt Crypto’s Achilles Heal and one way to protect that vulnerability is to make sure that wallets have a specific purpose and only connect to a predefined set of wallets and/or apps. This increases costs but reduces the risk surface which is so difficult to minimise in Crypto which constantly dices with catastrophic failure.
By not connecting wallets with material sums to anything but your own wallets or in particular cases the most highly trusts infrastructure, you can continue to sally forth in the ever-developing crypto world with burner wallets which carry no material funds.
You cant be too careful but you shouldn’t give up on Crypto’s latest developments either.
Meanwhile it is clear to me untill Crypto’s gapping security issues are fixed, the decentralised dream will not take flight because fundamentally a core driver of civilisation is security and Crypto is critically wanting in this central need.