With Bankfried’s (or Sam Bankman-Fried, or what that character out there calls himself) on-purpose fiasco and shameful exit designed to give Crypto coins a bad name, alternatives are needed for traders looking for option-style opportunities. Not only is Bankfried not what some people thought he was, the entire FTX fiasco isn’t either. The breakdown of FTX is not proof for “Bitcoin being bad” whatsoever. Bitcoin is about de-centralization (not about banks, not about privately-controlled exchanges, not about the credibility of some “conscious” capitalist or the lack of it) but Bitcoin is about cutting out the middleman. This includes middle-men like Bankfried, or Joe Biden, or Donald Trump — the list doesn’t stop here (only that the latter two never had a clue about Bitcoin or internet or high-tech, at al — for better or worse).

So the failure of yet-another centrally-controlled entity causing some damage to a number of Crypto-market participants does not even touch about the concept of de-centralization. It’s not rocket science to figure this out.

Bitcoiners who obey by common-sense rules of storing their coin in paper wallets or in cold storage, and never rely on others to store them for them were doing just fine — and did not lose a penny. So, when you look at it closely, the FTX-Fraud fiasco does not damage Bitcoin but it confirms Bitcoin and its safety — except for user error and negligence, both of which affected users alone are to blame for.

You do not leave money in hot wallets and/or on exchanges, but you bring it back home at the end of a trade or at the end of a trading day. You do not leave it on Coinbase, on FTX, let alone on Binance, a minute longer than needed. Yes, it is convenient to use an exchange’s or other provider’s public and private keys to store your coins in — but no, it is dangerous: not your keys, not your coins. Simple as that.

Regardless, for the loss of leveraged long and short coins on BTC, LTC, ETH and others, there is a replacement needed for options-style leveraged trading that FTX’ “Bull” tokens and “Bear” tokens offered back in the day. An alternative might be with other exchanges, and we’ll look into that further in a separate article.

Maybe, we all can resume trading leveraged long and short positions with alternative tools — on other exchanges, and always with the above safety measures in place.