Will you be smarter than the Apple co-founder?
Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple AAPL, -0.32% who is widely considered to be a tech genius, made a rudimentary and expensive mistake recently.
“I had seven bitcoins stolen from me through fraud,” Wozniak said at the Times’ Global Business Summit on Monday. “Somebody bought them from me online through a credit card and they cancelled the credit card payment. It was that easy. And it was from a stolen credit card number so you can never get it back.”
With bitcoin BTC, +0.55% currently valued at $10,000, the move lost him the equivalent of $70,000 (or $140,000 at bitcoin’s peak value of $20,000).
His mistake is far too easy to do, said Joe Blackburn, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur and head adviser at Cryptohunt, a blockchain-based geolocational treasure hunting game. “There is so much that can go wrong,” he said. “If this guy scammed Steve Wozniak out of 70 grand who knows how much he has made off of other people?”
That is why it is important to take a number of security measures in the crypto world, especially when dealing with large volumes of money.
His mistake is far too easy to do, said Joe Blackburn, a cryptocurrency entrepreneur and head adviser at Cryptohunt, a blockchain-based geolocational treasure hunting game. “There is so much that can go wrong,” he said. “If this guy scammed Steve Wozniak out of 70 grand who knows how much he has made off of other people?”
That is why it is important to take a number of security measures in the crypto world, especially when dealing with large volumes of money.
Store your cryptocurrency offline
The private key, or PIN, is what gives your bitcoin its value, and is best kept in a physical wallet or at the bottom of your sock drawer or anywhere else it will be safe from water damage, like a safe deposit box.
Digital platforms like Coinbase don’t give users a bitcoin PIN, so bitcoin holders can export the currency to a wallet and extract the PIN or send it to an address generated by a site like Bitcoin.com. They can also use a hard wallet like a Ledger Wallet, which connects to the computer by USB.
Source/More: Steve Wozniak had $70,000 in bitcoin stolen after falling for a simple, yet perfect, scam – MarketWatch
