Cryptocurrency News & Discussion

The original post: /r/cryptocurrency by /u/illHaveTwoNumbers9s on 2025-01-01 11:58:40.

Happy New Year everyone. As a new year begins and new investors enter the crypto market this year like last year, I would like to share a few golden rules with you so that you don't get scammed and lose all your money:

1. Not you keys not your coins. In other words, if you want to invest a lot of money, buy a hardware wallet such as Ledger or Trezor. Because as long as the coins/tokens (I'll just write coins for the sake of simplicity) are on the broker or exchange, you can lose them if they f*ck up or the exchange goes bust (see FTX).
   1. If you have a hardware wallet (Cold Wallet) or a wallet created with an app such as Trust Wallet (Hot Wallet), never, absolutely NEVER share your 12 to 24 word phrase with anyone. This is the key to your wallet in the event of loss of login details. Also, do not take screenshots or photos of it that you then save on technical devices of any kind. It has often happened that people have revealed their phrase and had their wallets emptied as a result. Also do an antivirus scan on your devices to remove malware searching for any detail about crypto on your device
   2. Never buy hardware wallets from third-party providers, but only from the manufacturer itself. This is because third-party providers can provide you with hacked devices or devices with a phrase already attached and fake instructions, with which scammers can empty your wallet
2. Always DYOR (do your own research). Dont buy any coins trusting some crappy Youtubers. Many of them either don't know what they are saying or are paid by influencers or developers to advertise for their scamcoin. Also dont participate in anything you dont understund (Trading, Liquidity Pools, Lending, Staking or Leverage). Also be aware of Initial Coin Offers (ICO's). 99% of them are fake and/or scam.
3. On social media, no one is your friend who wants to give you a hot tip or offer their help with problems. There are a lot of scammers lurking on all platforms. You will often receive DMs after almost every post about cryptocurrencies. Many will approach you in a very subtle and friendly way to suggest that they are not scammers. But they all are. Don't accept their DM request and be aware.
4. Only invest as much money as you can bear to lose. Don't invest money that you need. Diversify your portfolio. Dont invest all of your money into only one coin.
5. Dont let emotions take control of you. Don't fall for hypes, don't do FOMO (fear of missing out) or lose your nerves if something goes down. The crypto market is very volatile and you have to be able to live with the fact that your portfolio can be down 30% from one day to the next, but you must also not fall into euphoria as soon as your portfolio is up 50%. Try to turn off your greed. As soon as you see something like this, realize profits (unless we are at the beginning of the bull market). Another indicator for selling is when even any crappy page or magazine suddenly starts talking about crypto. It's a bit of a meme, but it has proven to be true more than once. Sometimes its very hard to sell a coin to take profit. Because you sometimes build up an emotional hold on a coin. Just take the profit and never look back at what happened or what could be happen.
6. Do not buy any coins on decentralized exchanges (DEX) such as Uniswap, Raydium, Pancakeswap etc. until you have gained enough experience in the crypto sector in general. There are a lot of scams lurking there that can either empty your wallet because you give them the authorization to do so or fall for a honeypot where you only serve as a provider of liquidity but can no longer sell anything so that the scammer can cash out.
   1. If you have some experience, then always check the contract adress which you can find on Coin Market Cap or Coingecko, before buying a coin. Also check if a coin is a scam on pages like Token Sniffer. You should also know which DEX runs on which chain. Its a bit more complicated but for example Uniswap runs on the Ethereum Chain. Therefore you won't be able to find coins which run on the Solana chain like PENGU. If you search for PENGU you will get some coins who are named the same but are either different ones or just scams. Always work with the contract adress. And if you are not sure, do research about it at first

So those were my tips for you. If I have forgotten something, please feel free to add it. I wish everyone a healthy new year and lots of profits. Take care