I don't know about that. For people like you and me that are likely to be familiar with good infosec practices, run open source OSes and only open source software, with no possibility of spyware or ransomware, have offline backups and offsite backups, sure, this advice is fine.
For most people though, I feel like exchanges are safer from the more common threats: viruses, ransomware, failed hard drives, fire, floods, "gimme-your-laptop" gunpoint, ... They ironically also make your crypto slightly more anomymized since you aren't always spending out of the same wallet address so when you transfer crypto to someone, they don't automatically know your crypto net worth.
I wouldn't trust Binance though. I moved all my funds off Binance for one reason -- their UI (especially authentication workflow) is super buggy, and that makes me extremely not confident that their backend isn't equally buggy. To top that, when I tried to report bugs to them they wanted my national ID to even engage in conversation, instead of fixing the bugs. Fuck that. Fix bugs first and only then will I trust you with my ID.
Kraken, Bittrex, Coinbase Pro have solid UIs and give me more confidence in the quality of their engineering.
How about simply losing your hardware wallet? That's what scares me. If I had enough crypto, I'd probably get a hardware wallet and store it in a safe deposit box, but then I'm going to lose that key.
I wonder if there is an opportunity for smart contracts around insurance for the exchanges...a bit meta...
Sounds hard, because it would be hard to prove that you lost a key. You could always pretend you lost it.
But if the blockchain supports actually invalidating those coins and transferring them to a new wallet via e.g. 3 trusted friends with pre-pregrammed wallets that sign and verify your new wallet, maybe it could work.
For most people though, I feel like exchanges are safer from the more common threats: viruses, ransomware, failed hard drives, fire, floods, "gimme-your-laptop" gunpoint, ... They ironically also make your crypto slightly more anomymized since you aren't always spending out of the same wallet address so when you transfer crypto to someone, they don't automatically know your crypto net worth.
I wouldn't trust Binance though. I moved all my funds off Binance for one reason -- their UI (especially authentication workflow) is super buggy, and that makes me extremely not confident that their backend isn't equally buggy. To top that, when I tried to report bugs to them they wanted my national ID to even engage in conversation, instead of fixing the bugs. Fuck that. Fix bugs first and only then will I trust you with my ID.
Kraken, Bittrex, Coinbase Pro have solid UIs and give me more confidence in the quality of their engineering.