The interactive part
Before anything else, we’re going to make you complete a poll. Just kidding, it’s not much of a quiz with only 3 options. But it’s hugely helpful in helping you make up your mind about the question that precedes this article. So here it goes.
You’re looking for a life partner. You’re serious but you also want to have some fun along the way.
Your options:
- A gorgeous but temperamental superstar girl who’s capable of quite a few tricks – but she’ll probably be in someone else’s arms tomorrow. Always uses protection.
- A pretty cute girl who makes up for the lack of gorgeousness by not using protection at all. To heck with it! Let’s just have fun. She also has 30,000 users.
- A military security girl who scares you because she's’ not allowed to talk about work but you have a feeling she can break your arm in two like a carrot. And you’ve seen her once using a knife to open a tin can and, God, you don’t ever want to see that again. You’re not afraid to admit you’re afraid of her because God knows where she’s from. But she’s fiercely loyal and seems to be really good at what she does.
Did you memorize your answer? Now let's go back to figuring out your strategy.
What’s in a KYC?
This is the age where the Fed is printing more money than ever, people work and save like there’s no tomorrow, and crime is on the rise like never before with record numbers of crypto exchange hacks in 2019 and quite staggering statistics:
- There is a hacker attack every 39 seconds.
- Russian hackers are the fastest.
- 300,000 new malware is created every day.
- Multi-factor authentication and encryption are the biggest hacker obstacles.
- You can become an American citizen for $6,000.
- The average cost of data breaches will be about 150 million in 2020.
- The cybersecurity budget in the US is $14.98 billion.
Then again, if you’re a Russian hacker, you’re probably going to like those numbers a lot.
What have you got to protect yourself with? In a sense, when you’re surfing the Internet, you’re just choosing to forget about imminent dangers the way most surfers try not to think about sharks. They’re there, and you may get bit – but hey, that’s just how life is.
Do surfers have it right? Should you just chill and go with the flow? Perhaps there’s no sense in getting paranoid about attacks – to a point. If you had gold but didn’t sleep at night thinking about someone stealing it and got yourself a heart attack in a week, there wouldn’t be much point in having gold.
But you also need to be careful. As in, you don’t place your gold on the street and sit there at home playing Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater hoping for the best. You don’t pour blood in the water when you surf because you like how it shines in the water at dawn.
Are KYC exchanges better?
Generally, it’s not a very good idea to tar everyone with the same brush but normally KYC-enabled exchanges are better regulated, meaning they have more customers and better rep, which in turn means they have more money to spend on security and providing backup plans in case of emergency.
How to protect yourself against a KYC
These 7 lucky charms will keep you safe(r). They don’t take any time at all, and you should definitely take them:
- Take advantage of cryptography and multi-factor authentication.
- Get email notifications when significant actions are being performed with your account.
- Use TOR so avoid being tracked.
- Read books like Hacking The Hacker.
- Set reasonable passwords (NOT your birthday – Josh).
- Put 3 pieces of paper in your wallet with fake PINs so that if someone steals your card they’ll try them all and the card gets blocked (ok, sort of getting carried away here).
- Use KYC.
Now, KYC is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s 2020, which goes right after, you guessed it, 2019, so if ever there was a time to have more security it is now.
On the other hand, you thought the whole idea with crypto was to be anonymous and stealthy like a cyber cloak-and-dagger ninja in the night, so neither your foes nor the government can track you (often you can’t tell which one is which) .
And here you are, obediently sending off your passwords, private keys, and passports to someone you don’t know and who will extremely likely, based on previous data, be hacked next. What a great idea! Banks are not ideal either, with more than half a thousand going bust since January 2000.
What to do? Do you go for anonymity and Jason-Bourne it, relying on nothing but your skills and Destiny favoring the brave? Or relax in the hands of authorities and hand over all your data – because you know you can trust the system? It’s not like the authorities ever let you down, right?
The choices aren’t pretty but the good news is that if you’re smart, know how to hold your own, and have a good sensei, you can overcome any obstacle.
What to do
Anonymity
To avoid your Internet Provider going through your logs use an encrypted connection like TOR, which is free, easy to install, and works like magic.
Stealth
If you insist on giving over your private keys to an exchange, don’t keep thousands in there just in case something happens.
Diversification
Diversify! Put some money in your bank, some in a crypto exchange, some under the floorboards.
Smarts
Get strong passwords. If you want to get funky, ask someone geeky to set up your PC so that you have to press several buttons at the time it loads so that it loads another partition with all your private data. Others don’t know, and if they start up your PC without your permission they’ll just assume they’re in – and they’re only using a version where there’s nothing valuable. It’s perfect.
Diversion
Hardware wallets work on a similar principle. If someone threatens you into giving up your crypto you give them an alternative code that fools the culprit into thinking there’s next to nothing crypto in there. Subdermal wallets are even better.
What you REALLY don’t want to do is send off your documents to an exchange. So many of them have been hacked that it’s without a doubt just a question of time until another one falls. Gambling with all your capital is the worst sort of gamble. By the way, in this, you risk everything and stand to win nothing.
Choosing an exchange like Nominex with no KYC on withdrawals of up to 3 BTC is an excellent option. It also happens to come from the world’s cybersecurity capital, Tallinn, next door to The NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence. If NATO trusts Estonia with security, so should you.
Why Nominex?
Nominex provides an optimal ratio between security and anonymity you won’t find anywhere else (we checked).
You could, of course, go to Binance, where you’ll be asked to provide all your KYC data and wait for a couple of weeks to get approved (which is completely contrary to all the principles of crypto). But only after you shake your head really slowly in front of the camera. And then your KYC will be leaked and the exchange itself will get hacked.
Digitex, on the other hand, just like Nominex, gets nothing but euphoric reviews. But no KYC. Zero fees are tempting but exactly how safe will you feel?
Or you can learn from these mistakes that tens of Bitcoins spent on PR, colossal infrastructure, and millions of lemmings can be wrong.
What uncontended service is actually about is genius. And analyzing feedback from users and failed projects. And a lot of hard work.
How does Nominex rise above and beyond?
Pavel Shkitin, CEO of Nominex:
"Nominex’s policy is all about caring for the user first. So we moved to Seychelles so that our traders can work without KYC on small volumes.
Personal and classy service means we at Nominex know that crypto exchanges will inevitably go along the path of banking. And this means that human-to-human, respectful, considerate service will soon become the foundation of everything without which nothing else will be possible to be built. Therefore, we try to provide an incontestable and customizable-to-the-maximum service even to small traders right now.
Although we treat everyone the same, in terms of functionality there is a VIP service for partners. We give special services to large traders and partners, including dynamic commissions. If you have VIP status, then you earn more and spend less."
So what’s next? Nominex offers an exchange that offers unprecedented security that comes from the most secure place on Earth, and very flexible terms.
Here, you can withdraw your 10 Bitcoins in 4 goes without handing over your data to conmen (the Russian hackers are having a party with laikas, balalaikas, and medveds). You can also enjoy a dizzying array of other benefits such as very low fees (with further discounts for holders of NMX tokens), discount cards, mahoosive passive income, 4 types of bonuses, advanced order types and support that treats you like a friend and actually likes you as a human being.
PS, Oh, the answers. 1 is Binance, 2 is Digitex, and 3 is Nominex. Think you can figure out why?