[scient]

But muh decentralization! /s

In reality most of the exchanges and sites dealing with crypto were (and probably still are) built by absolute amateurs with no checks and balances on their apps from a security perspective. Its scary as hell that people trust those sites with their actual money.

[semi-extrinsic]

The recent QuadrigaCX fiasco shows this very clearly. The entire exchange (one of the biggest in Canada) was somehow just running on the encrypted laptop of this one guy, and after he suddenly died in December, there is 250 million Canadian Dollars owed to 100k+ customers that nobody can recover, because the guy with the password is dead.

[52-6F-62]

Minor correction: the exchange wasn’t running on a laptop. It was run on systems you’d expect it to run on.

What was stored on the encrypted laptop was all of the cold storage wallets containing the majority of the digital assets.

No less idiotic, but an important factual distinction.

[semi-extrinsic]

Aha, this makes sense. (Wikipedia states that the exchange was running on his laptop, which I did indeed find curious/impressive.)