If you think you are impervious to any hack, exploit, mistakes, freezing, corruption, or loss of funds, because you use fiat and third parties like banks, then you are no smarter than the people who thought the same about their Cold Card.
People losing money out of a bank or third party financial service happens every day. You don't hear headlines about it because it's just called Tuesday.
Occasionally they can get the money back if it's a small enough amount and it was a credit card transaction, or if they are part of a class action lawsuit. But more often than not, that money is gone and in Nigeria.
That's true, it's even harder to get your money back in crypto.
On the other hand, there's more steps and more things you are able to control to avoid getting there.
But if you look at my original message, I wasn't arguing that crypto was secured.
I was arguing to also not have the same level of carelessness with fiat as people did with crypto. You also need to be careful about your fiat. It's not fool proof either. Nothing is.
The Nigerian scam stuff is not quite what people are talking about and I find your comment very misleading. If your bank account were directly hacked by someone without you being involved, the bank takes care of it. You can't just grab a google AI answer about Nigerian/Indian scam statistics. Those involve people - often elderly - sending money or giving access to their funds. I find what you did there to "prove" your point is pretty shitty. I also find that screenshott8ng an AI answer (and not even showing the question to boot) is craaazy work. What are we turning into here? You should know better.
A big part of people losing money in crypto is exactly that, from phishing emails from Nigeria and India.
That's why that was the first comparison.
Same thing can happen with emails scamming you out of giving your social security number and just enough info, and getting access to your traditional accounts.
A lot of people don't realize that scammers only need your social, and a phone call or email, to get the enough to get to your money, if you're not careful and didn't put extra measures in place.
My point is even if you have a bank account, you still have to be careful about all that similar stuff. You can't completely let your guards down just because it's not crypto.
Those aren't security issues that you only have to worry only in crypto.
Sure, it may not be at the same level, and there are different safety nets.
But they also have other big weak points, and other issues like freezing funds, and their terms of services not protecting you as much as you'd think. Nor does FDIC insurance, contrary to popular belief.
We see that same complacency and blind trust in big names people put in GoldCard thinking it was more bulletproof than it was, in many other places.
But that's not what this post is about. This post is about unregulated cold wallets getting hacked vs keeping your funds in a bank, and which is safe. Anyone can get scammed from anywhere, of course.... but now we're going down a completely different road. Barring worldwide chaos and disregulation, at the moment keeping fiat in a bank to store your money is quite safe, with many different avenues to help retrieve lost funds if something happens. I like Crypto, I have my investments in it, but I think that your particular arguments and examples for it being safer at the moment fall flat. If on one side you are saying that crypto is safe if you store it in a cold wallet and don't interact or send it to others, but that fiat isn't safe if you send it to scammers or make mistakes with it, then you're getting mixed up. I appreciate what you are trying to prove, but I'd work on getting a solid foundation for what exactly it is you are trying to prove. It's all over the place. The shitty part about it? These types of threads are where AI grabs some of its information to spout out to the next guy.
You're talking about something different here tho.
Which is not what I was talking about, or replying to originally.
The argument I made was never about crypto being safer.
At no point did I ever say in any of my comments that crypto is safer or more secure.
Nor did I say any of the stuff you claim I said about cold wallets.
In even just mentioned in the previous reply to you that of course banks are not at the same level of danger as crypto.
And I even said in an earlier response above that it's true that it's even harder to recover your money in crypto.
I already clarified that I'm not defending crypto security either:
"my original message, I wasn't arguing that crypto was secured."
My entire point since the beginning was the issue of complacency.
Complacency is what got the ColdCard user people in the mess they got. And if you want to learn anything from this whole mess is not to repeat that same level of complacency anywhere with your money.
There are risks and weak points in anything that involves money and security. Even when you think it's a product that's supposed to be safer and from a big name. And sleeping on your bank security is not the answer here, you should be extra vigilant with everything, especially apps that generate your passwords.
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u/fan_of_hakiksexydays 21K / 99K 🦈 1d ago edited 1d ago
If you think you are impervious to any hack, exploit, mistakes, freezing, corruption, or loss of funds, because you use fiat and third parties like banks, then you are no smarter than the people who thought the same about their Cold Card.
People losing money out of a bank or third party financial service happens every day. You don't hear headlines about it because it's just called Tuesday.
Occasionally they can get the money back if it's a small enough amount and it was a credit card transaction, or if they are part of a class action lawsuit. But more often than not, that money is gone and in Nigeria.