Common beginner mistakes

Most of the losses I have watched happen in the first year of someone’s crypto use come back to the same small set of errors.

Treating the seed phrase like a password. People screenshot it, save it in Notes, email it to themselves, or skip writing it down entirely. The seed phrase is not a backup of your wallet; it is your wallet. Anyone who has those words, in that order, owns everything in it. Paper or steel, offline, in more than one physical location. Nothing else is safe.

Keeping too much in hot wallets because cold wallets feel inconvenient. Mobile and browser wallets are for small, active balances. Anything meaningful belongs in cold storage. The inconvenience of pulling out a hardware wallet is not comparable to the permanence of loss.

Copying addresses from transaction history. Address poisoning attacks work by sending a small amount from a lookalike address so it appears in your history next to your real recipient. Verify the full string every time, or paste from a trusted source.

Leaving DeFi approvals open indefinitely. When you use a protocol, you grant its contract permission to move your tokens. That permission does not expire. Revoke.cash lets you audit and remove active approvals in a few minutes. Do it monthly at minimum.

Treating the end of confusion as the same thing as understanding. A concept that just started to make sense is not yet knowledge. Give it time. Test it by explaining it to someone else in your own words.