Bitcoin 'Self-custody' is a life skill you need to learn
Most bitcoin exchanges will fail in the future and people will lose their bitcoin due to the hard realities of how absolute scarcity works.
For the last 50 years, bank failures are becoming rarer thanks to endless money printing and bank bailouts. when money is hard i.e gold-backed bank failures are a natural reality as the success of one bank necessitates the failure of another, as hard money is a zero-sum game.
Post the Nixon Shock , Money became pure 'Fiat' and there seems to be an endless supply of new money because of which bank failures have become rarer and rarer.
Brave New Bitcoin World
In the world of Bitcoin money is not just hard, it's extremely hard, for the first time in human history money is absolutely scarce ( as bitcoin's total supply is fixed at 21 Million tokens and new issuance going down constantly). While this is great news for Bitcoin holders, it's not such great news if you leave your bitcoin on the exchange in order to earn some interest.
When Exchanges lend out your bitcoin to someone to earn that interest back to you, they engage in what is called 'market risk' and if and when the bets turn sour, there is no 'big daddy' like the Federal reserve ready to bail out crypto exchanges.
All this means bitcoin left on exchanges will be lost regularly
Self-Custody
The preferred alternative to leaving your bitcoin on exchanges is 'self custody' through your own wallets which are classified as. 'software' and 'hardware' wallets
Software wallets are those bitcoin apps on your phone or laptop etc which store the bitcoin keys on these devices, these are considered to be risky ways of storing bitcoin.
Most of the early bitcoin hacks have happened on software wallets
Hardware wallets
H/W ( hardware ) wallets are the recommended solution for bitcoin keys, H/W wallets are special purpose devices designed for just one thing and one thing only - keep bitcoin keys secure from hacks.
The history of remote hacks of hardware wallets is near zero ( except for odd cases like this as a result of Ledger data breach )
Multi-sig
Multi-signature wallets are a new breed of wallets that improve security drastically think of them as a joint account which needs more than one sign when funds need to be moved. Combining multi-sig with hardware wallets improves security to a whole new level and makes losing bitcoin to remote hacks or even physical attacks an impossibility.
Conclusion
Bitcoin is considered the world's best store of value owing to its incredible properties . The developed world is deeply addicted to debt with no end in sight, the only way out of this debt cycle is money printing which causes inflation over time. The best way to fight inflation is to invest in a hard store-of-value type investment like Bitcoin or end up losing purchasing power over time due to money printing.
If and when you decide to invest and save your money in Bitcoin, it's wise to store that in multiple hardware wallets.
Remember Bitcoin is hard to digest, but so are most great ideas.