Educational Byte: Should You Tell Friends and Family That You Own Crypto?

We get it: talking about crypto in general and about your crypto holdings in particular can be tempting, sometimes. It's not as if numerous people haven't done it before, and isn't it about "spreading the word," after all? So, should you tell friends, family, and strangers about crypto? There’s no definitive answer to that, but we have some considerations ahead.

Why Many Crypto Users Stay Quiet

We’re gonna answer this with a couple of real stories. In 2017, a man we’ll call "John Doe" shared with a friend, Louis Meza, that he had a lot of saved Ether (ETH). It probably came as something natural, as an investment opportunity you’d share with any buddy. Meza didn’t take it like that, though. Instead of going to buy his own ETH portion, he joined forces with two members of a Bronx biker gang to kidnap and threaten John Doe to get his private keys. They stole around $1.8 million this way.

Luckily for John Doe, authorities arrested the culprits in 2018 and recovered the funds. Now let’s examine another episode, in 2023. This one is about the crypto streamer Ivan Bianco, who was on a live stream with his community on YouTube, attempting to log into a gaming account. He found his gaming password in the same text file where he wrote his private keys… and everyone saw them. Live. One of the viewers didn’t wait to empty around $60k from his wallet.