Cryptocoin Control is not an Illusion with Swapity
Now that we are about a month away from the Swapity Exchange launching, we have started to grab our bullhorn and tell the world about the reasons we are so excited. In our article yesterday we talked about how you never have to set-up an account or provide us with ANY personal details to complete swaps on our exchange.
Today our topic is security. Unfortunately there have been too many stories delivering bad news about security breaches and theft of personal data and digital assets like cryptocurrencies. It is one thing to have your card payment details leaked along with 41 million other Target customers as happened in 2013, but cryptocurrencies were supposed to be more secure.
Despite the promise of the highest levels of encryption and privacy, the cryptocurrency space has not been immune to similar attacks. Many of you are probably familiar with how the Mt.Gox exchange had over 850,000 Bitcoins somehow “disappear”. Ouch. That was a really bad day for a lot of people who trusted that exchange.
If Swapity had been around back when those $473 million in Bitcoin holdings were stolen many people might have avoided that financial loss. On a traditional exchange they hold the private keys of all your cryptocurrencies that you have on that exchange. The fact is, if you do not control the private keys for a coin you have no control whatsoever and have abdicated the protection of these assets to a third-party.
With Swapity we never hold your coins so you always maintain 100% control of your assets. If someone were to compromise our platform, users who have completed swaps would have nothing to fear. An additional bonus is that none of your personal data would be compromised either since we do not require you to create an account of any kind to beginning swapping tokens. So no matter what happens we would have nothing of yours to lose or have stolen.
Here is an excerpt from our whitepaper with additional commentary:
Users always have complete control over their coins. Traditional exchanges store the user’s coins on accounts linked to their login. Users don’t have access to their coin’s private keys so it is impossible for them to retain unrestricted access to them. You are risking your coin’s value and safety by holding cryptocurrency in exchange accounts. You put 100% of your trust in the exchange owner. What happens if their exchange website becomes overloaded? It would refuse to log you in, preventing you from withdrawing your coins. You could’ve otherwise exchanged them on a different service in the meantime. During that critical time the value of your coins could drop.
Another issue is security. Most exchanges aren’t insured in the case of theft. If a hacker were to compromise an exchange and drain the balances of accounts (unfortunately an all too common occurrence) the exchange has no legal requirement to repay you for lost funds. The best example is the famous Mt Gox exchange hack which lead to malicious actors stealing $460 million worth of Bitcoin back in 2014 when Bitcoin was $618. The stolen Bitcoins valued at the recent $5000 high would be worth $3.72 billion.
Yes, that is right. 850,000 Bitcoins x the $19,000 high price in December would equal in excess of $16 billion. Ouch again. All those gains people were never able to realize because they failed to keep their private keys secure. True, the Mt Gox team had an epic failure, but each individual needs to ultimately be responsible for the security and protection of their own digital assets.
Very soon crpto-enthusiasts and newbies alike will be able to use Swapity for the easiest and safest cryptocoin transactions anywhere. Stay tuned!
