Not Your Keys Not Your Coin - It's Your Bitcoin so Truly Own It
You've probably heard this saying before ''Not your keys, not your coins'' that's right, when you leave your bitcoin on exchanges you basically give them the permission to freeze it or spend it at anytime without your permission. If the exchange get hack(which usually do happen) you will lose all your funds period. You don't believe me? Ask the victims of the Mt. Gox exchange hack in 2014 where 700,000 bitcoins were lost forever and also the nearly 120,000 bitcoins that were stolen from the Bitfinex exchange in 2016. And from time to time you hear a random hack of an exchange from which a lot of people lose their money.
Not only that, but what if the exchange does not have the amount of bitcoin they say they have? This is called insolvency where the exchange is basically bankrupt and it can't give its customers the bitcoin it sold them. What do you do at this point?
Since you never holed your bitcoin in your own custody there will be nobody to call to get your bitcoin back, because the hacker will not reverse the stolen coins to the exchange. And the exchange can simply sign up for bankruptcy and call it a day, and you will feel sorry for yourself. There are so many other ways you can lose your coins forever when you don't hold them properly in your own custody. So it is your responsibility to learn taking custody of your own bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a big deal! It gives you the opportunity to become your own bank not just a bank account where you can simply call someone to reverse a transaction, but you are in control. So as you would expect, this comes with responsibility.
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In Bitcoin, those days of outsourcing the task of holding your money to someone else are over and if you refuse to learn this now then you are up for a big surprise.
Self-custody means you simply withdraw your bitcoin from exchanges to a cold storage wallet that you yourself control.
Here are some wallet companies that you can buy your hardware wallet directly from:
Trezor: https://trezor.io/
Ledger: https://www.ledger.com/
Coldcard(Airgap, never go online): https://coldcard.com/
Please avoid buying hardware wallets from Amazon or other stores that are not the exact wallet company itself, because chances are someone already bought it and set it up therefore he/she may know the secret seed words so when you send your coins on it they will steal it, so be careful!
In conclusion, it's your bitcoin, learn how to truly own it, if you need to login or ask permission from somebody else to access your bitcoin then it's not yours.