TL; DR: If you do not secure your bitcoin it could be stolen. Prospective thieves have become experts at cheating people to give them access to their Bitcoin wallet. That means they are gone forever.
Read on to learn why securing your Bitcoin is essential.
Bitcoin is different. More Control. Increased Risk.
Cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are unlike any electronic financial instrument that existed before they were invented. This is because unlike everything else (dollars, stocks, etc.) Bitcoin does not rely on third parties to process the transaction. This is great for your financial sovereignty, but it also means that there are new risks for the consumer.
In the legacy financial system, if you accidentally send dollars using a third party such as your bank account, or payment app, or if a hacker is accessing your account and trying to send dollars himself, all is not lost.
That dollar transaction occurred on the internal ledgers maintained by one or many companies. So, this means that those companies can, in theory, see what happened and unwind your transaction. Before Bitcoin, negotiating through companies was the only way to send money online. Most of us have come to expect this kind of safety net.
Bitcoin transactions are final.
The magic of Bitcoin and all the other cryptocurrencies is that they do not have a company that processes the transaction. When you send Bitcoin from your wallet, your transaction is set to a global network of miners, which then adds your transaction to the main list of transactions called Bitcoin blockchain (called Blockchain.com). You will never know who those miners are and the blockchain is permanent.
What does this mean? Well, for one thing, Bitcoin is the first way to send money online that no one can stop. When you manage your private key, you have complete control of your money. Blockchain.com gives you the tools to do just that with our Private Key Wallet and Exchange Wallet.
If you use your wallet to make a transaction on a Bitcoin network, no one, or even us, can stop it.
This also means that if someone else secures access to your wallet and makes a transaction, we cannot reverse it. It has been broadcast to the network and will be there for eternity.
This means, ultimately, the security of your Wallet – and your crypto – lying in your hands. If someone accesses your wallet, there is no right to turn. We cannot undo the transaction. No one can undo the transaction.
Think of it as cash in your wallet. If you drop the wallet and someone takes the cash, it’s gone forever.