The tale of the three apples.

In crypto one of the main obstacles to overcome currently for people not already involved is how to understand security and how to not get scammed for your crypto. Recently I’ve had the same conversation with different people I work with and they have all said they don’t understand how crypto ownership works with regards security so I explained it to them like this below, now granted this is a very simplified way to explain things but I feel it is an effective way to simply tell people the differences in ways to “own” crypto. Anyone wants to add to it please do:

The tale of the three apples.

The tale of the three apples has three scenarios all of which begin in exactly the same place with the Fruit store being the exchange or place you initially purchase your crypto from.

Scenario 1 :

You are in a street market, the kind of market you find all across the world and in every country, you see a fruit store and on sale are some lovely apples. You buy three apples and pay for them but you leave them sat where they were - in amongst the other apples : they’re your apples and both you and the store owner acknowledge this fact. This is buying crypto and leaving on exchange.

Scenario two:

You are in a street market, the kind of market you find all across the world and in every country, you see a fruit store and on sale are some lovely apples. You buy and pay for three apples and you take the apples and put them in the basket you are carrying, they are your apples and are in your possession. They are reasonably safe however if someone unscrupulous wanted to take the apples they could conceivably cause you to look the other way by distracting you and take the apples, the likelihood of this is very low as you are diligent, but it is a possibility. This is storing your crypto in a hot wallet e.g metamask/phantom/trust/Muun

Scenario three:

You are in a street market, the kind of market you find all across the world and in every country, you see a fruit store and on sale are some lovely apples. You buy and pay for three apples, you leave and go directly home and you take the apples and put them in a secure vault in your house that only you have the code for. This is storing your crypto in a cold wallet e.g Ledger/Trezor