Fellow humans,
Nobody wants to be scammed into losing money. First of all, scammers don’t deserve our money. Second, scams are usually obvious.
Two scams I’ve noticed in the bitcoin industry are send to receive bitcoin and give up your private keys. I’ve witnessed the first but have only heard of the second.
Send bitcoin to receive free bitcoin. The most popular incident I can think of was the Twitter hack last year. A hacker took control of many popular Twitter accounts including Elon Musk, and asked the Twitter community to send bitcoin to a wallet address to receive twice the amount of bitcoin in return. Scam. Don’t fall for those. Who gives away that much money to strangers?
Give up your private keys. If you self-custody your bitcoin, you have private keys. I’ve heard that fake email accounts pretending to be hardware wallet companies are asking Bitcoiners to enter their private keys onto a fake website. Never give up your private keys to anyone. Nobody. If you give up your private keys or lose them, your bitcoin is probably gone forever.
I believe we are still on the lower levels of the current bitcoin bull market. As bitcoin reaches six figures, many more scams will surface. If you aren’t a bitcoin expert, no problem, I don’t claim to be one either. However, we can easily avoid scams by self-custody and HODLing. Hold on for deal life (HODL).
One final note for today — owning one bitcoin should be a long-term goal. Just because one cannot afford a whole bitcoin today does not mean one should not aspire to own a whole bitcoin someday. Remember, no more than 21M bitcoin will ever exist, so owning even a majority fraction of a bitcoin is an achievement.
If we fall for a scam, we might find ourselves with no coins.
Until next time,
Salvatore Norge