Bitcoin is well known for its safety. The biggest dangers are mainly hacker attacks on third party services, through which one accesses his bitcoins. These are above all the various crypto exchanges on which the users have created accounts or the bitcoins stored locally in wallets.
Basically, either the exchange itself is directly attacked, so that data can be stolen there. The biggest known incident was the hacker attack on Mt.Gox about 4 years ago, when a huge hack of Bitcoins was looted. This was also the reason for the decrease of Bitcoins 2014.
Today, the exchanges have improved to prevent such occurrences, because it can come to hacks and the trade is severely restricted or even stopped completely. This often leads to strong price fluctuations, mainly caused by so-called panic sells.
An equally large attack surface offer individual mistakes that can easily be prevented. Individual mistakes are the responsibility of individual users and are often:
- insufficiently secured user accounts due to weak passwords
- Login on a phishing site
- send the private keys to a scammer
If a stranger has once gained access to your own accounts, he can quickly transfer the entire balance to another wallet and due to the anonymity, it is no longer clearly comprehensible. For such a kind of total loss helps therefore only a careful handling with your personal user data.
But as long as you follow to the usual security rules and pay attention to secure passwords, which you should also change from time to time and do not use the same password on many other pages, an accident normally cannot happen.
The high demand and high competition between exchanges has also contributed to the improvement of safety standards.
How make you sure to safe your Bitcoins?
Do not over-trust online services offering your services to save your coins. They are certainly convenient, but we must remember that any service can be hacked, if before that it just does not cease to exist, leaving you without money. Of course storing Bitcoins in your own offline wallet is somewhat more complicated, but also safer.
