Although Bitcoin is no longer a "something new and incomprehensible", there are no fewer misconceptions about it. There are hundreds of them, and they are passed from mouth to mouth, like ancient mantras or folklore.
I was recently asked: “A lot of people say that Bitcoin can be stolen and therefore it is very dangerous to buy it. Is this a delusion, and if not, how to protect yourself from this?"
Well, to begin with, I can not even imagine how these people complain about their bitcoins being stolen. I guess, there is a person sitting at a desk, and they (the people who have had their bitcoins stolen) come up every hour and complain that once again someone stole their bitcoins from them.
I mean, yes, indeed, someone somewhere steals bitcoins. It happens. But they are not stealing your bitcoins, but only those that you transferred to someone. Your bitcoins cannot be stolen. And they are yours only when you have your private key. This is only possible if you are using a hardware wallet like Trezor (non-sponsored).
In all other cases, even when you use the standard bitcoin core wallet from the official website, by installing it on a Windows computer and downloading the full blockchain to your disk, you will receive the wallet.dat file in the Bitcoin folder. Further is just a matter of technology.
There is a well-known case when one programmer, at the request of the owner, hacked a password-protected archive with private keys from a wallet with bitcoins worth more than $300 thousand in 42 minutes.
There are also entire message boards selling password-protected wallet files. Any search engine will tell you that the largest of them, Allprivatekeys, has, for example, wallets containing 10K BTC for a total of half a billion dollars. The price of such a wallet around 0.84 BTC. If it would be so easy to find a password for such a wallet, or it would be within the power of Google's super-quantum computer, then all these wallets would be sold out, wouldn't they?
Although there are successful stories here too.
The main place where it is easy to lose your cryptocurrencies is certainly all kinds of online wallets such as blockchain.com and crypto exchanges. For example, 75 exchanges died last year. Already in this year 2021, 10 more died. Moreover, the last three disappeared on the same day on March 15. There is even an online cemetery from the dead crypto-exchanges, starting in 2014 and the first on the list is MtGox.
But do you know what is not on the that list? There is no list of serial numbers for hardware wallets like Trezor. Since it's entire history there has not been a single case of stealing bitcoins from hardware wallets. There is nothing to steal there. The private key is hidden in the chip and can only sign payments without ever leaving the secure vault. You can use it in a Pakistani internet cafe by sticking it into a computer, infected with hundreds of Trojans and worms. It's that safe.
It's simple. YOUR bitcoins cannot be stolen. You just need to understand that if they are not in your wallet, but somewhere in the network, then they are no longer yours and the chances of losing such bitcoins always remain. Of course, there are reliable exchanges, software wallets, and even BRD-type mobile wallets that have never had a history of theft. But your bitcoins are the ones in your wallet with private keys.
