Authored by Simon Black via SovereignMan.com,
After spending the last few days in the Philippines scouting new factory locations for one of my businesses, I flew back to Singapore this morning to conclude negotiations with a large, publicly-listed conglomerate that’s made an offer to buy one of our assets.
It’s been a hectic trip so far. But while in town, I had a chance to see my friend Gregor again– the entrepreneur I interviewed in last week’s podcast discussion about precious metals vs. cryptocurrency.
In the podcast, Gregor and I talked about Bitcoin security– specifically the fact that very few people properly (i.e. securely) store their cryptocurrency.
And the more valuable these cryptocurrencies become, the higher the likelihood of theft.
For example, hackers are now frequently engaging in sophisticated phishing attacks, in which a user will receive an email with a subject line like, “You’ve just received 0.02841 BTC”.
Naturally, most people open the email.
The email goes on to state that the user has received a Bitcoin payment, and to please log in to his/her online Wallet to verify the transaction.
Once again, most people click on the link and attempt to log in to their wallet accounts.
The page they click on looks almost exactly their online Wallet provider’s website. But in reality it’s a fake.
So whenever an unsuspecting victim enters his/her username and password on the dummy website, they’re basically just giving that information to the hackers.
Tricks like these end up scamming people every single day.
Then there’s the risk of the online wallet websites themselves being hacked.
Or, if you hold most of your crypto on your computer or mobile phone, your own device could easily be hacked.
If you’re old enough to remember all the online scams from the early days of the modern Internet 15-20 years ago, that’s basically what’s happening in cryptocurrency today.
Gregor and his team have designed a new security standard to fight against these threats; specifically it’s a way to store Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies offline, and he alluded to this in our podcast last week.
We received so many inquires about this from our readers, I thought it would be useful to send you a link to what he’s doing so that you can see for yourself.
You can download the explanatory paper here.
At a minimum, the paper is an excellent overview of the weaknesses and security risks inherent in common Bitcoin storage methods, so it’s a nice, quality, free education.