Last night, at approximately 5:16 am, my MetaMask wallet got hacked as I was frantically trying to connect to a token sale for a project I believed in - NFT's for photography/video and environmental initiatives. The project is legitimate, but the customer support wasn't. With it, I lost my ENS name, my first purchase of digital art, which was more of a sentimental loss than anything, and around 35k worth of $DUSK (gulp). That's a significant amount of money for me, and boy, does it hurt. However, what pains me is the opportunity cost associated with losing that much money. My wife and I are sharing a car right now, we have a wedding to pay for this year, and I'm still living in my parent's basement. Yep, that money could have gone a long way.
So how do you rebound from a hack like this and come out the other end stronger? First, you take your lumps, learn, and move on. Here's what I've learned:
We are primates with lizard brains. Optimize for security above all.
Be wary of suspect customer support sites on Discord that reach out offering technical support. You should be reaching out to them, not the other way around.
After making a large trade, move your investment to a cold storage wallet or an exchange with better security. MetaMask is, after all, a hot wallet.
If you rush to move your tokens around or run tired like I was this morning un-caffeinated, stop what you are doing and chill. Mistakes happen when you aren't thinking clearly, and your emotions are running hot. I'm angrier at myself for the error than the actual money, but I still haven't told my wife.
Taking a step back, we can acknowledge that investing in crypto is full of heightened risk and reward, and that's why we love it. A lack of regulatory over-site may put some investors at risk. Still, for the most part, the market self-regulates, and investors learn personal risk tolerance quickly while learning how "un-risky" nascent industries can be when you put the time in. What I lost from a hack, I made up two-fold from staking and earning yield across every one of my digital assets. No, Gary "Goldman" Gensler isn't going to save us from every hacker and scammer, but he will regulate tokens and exchanges to the point of paralyzing innovation, this we know. The truth is, finicky dapps and shrewd hackers go hand-in-hand with VC-like investment opportunities and new financial products. I have to look at myself in the mirror and recognize that I've 10x'd my investments over the last couple of years, educated myself on Web 3.0, macroeconomics, and investor philosophy, and it's still so early. Maybe getting hacked is crypto's rite of passage or the cost of doing business in the wild wild west of the Metaverse. Or maybe, I'm an idiot. What I do know is that losing 35k was what I needed to get me writing again, and I'll take that as W.