If you are thinking about entering the crypto space, the first thing you should consider is security. There are many free simple steps you can take as preventive measures, to ensure your investments are safe. Prior to investing in crypto, I laid out a simple security plan:
Tip #1
Use sites like coin market cap and world coin index to find the official websites for cryptocurrencies and exchanges. During the bull market of 2017, there were many horror stories of people loosing their crypto, after google searching the website of exchanges; and logging in to fake websites that looked real. Make sure to bookmark your exchanges and official crypto websites after looking them up.
Tip #2
Learn about the different types of crypto wallets. There are many free articles describing the different types of crypto wallets. If you have a printer at home, consider printing a couple of paper wallets to have for an emergency.
Tip #3
In order to add a layer of protection, I created a separate email address that I use exclusively for banking and crypto. Two free email hosts that I found center on privacy, are protonmail and unseen
Tip #4
Having a notebook to write down your passwords, private keys and seed phrases, for your crypto wallets is important, so you can recover your accounts; if you loose access in an emergency. Saving this information on your device can be risky if your device is compromised. I write down information of my essential (official desktop wallets) crypto accounts.
Tip #5
I have a couple of micro SD cards that came with electronics and SD cards from a digital camera I no longer use, since most picture taking is done with phones today. I put these leftover cards to use by using them to back up information, ranging crypto wallet accounts that are not essential (third party wallets) to tax document pdfs. I prefer to use SD cards as they are easier to hide and I find they fail less often than usb drives. I always carry one of these backups if I am expecting to be far away from home.
Tip #6
When I started crypto I was very paranoid about my computer being compromised. In order to protect from this, I learned how to partition my hard drive. My main partition was windows, and my second partition was Linux. I used my Linux partition for crypto, as the Linux operating system is considered to be more secure than other operating systems. Linux operating systems are free for personal use. There are many free youtube videos on partitions and installing Linux. If you dont want to learn Linux I would at least install a second partition of the OS you are familiar with.
Being paranoid of your crypto security is a good thing. It is better to be safe than sorry.
