To expand on parent, you may wish to read a little more about USDC, Uniswap and non custodial wallets (also known as self custody).
Uniswap would allow you to trade any token that follows the ERC20 interface (not all of them do, but many). USDC would allow you to mitigate day to day price volatility. Non custodial wallet would mean the burden lies on you to secure the funds, but a CEX getting hacked or investing away your deposits is not possible. Self custody also means you could move some to another CEX in US to attempt withdrawal.
Also should note there are different and additional risks with this approach: you might lose your keys, get phished/hacked, or use the blockchain incorrectly, or USDC/Uniswap contracts could fail, etc.
Thank you! I'm not very familiar with USDC, though I am familiar with Dai and the MakerDAO ecosystem, and it looks like USDC serves a similar purpose, even though the design between the two looks different (one is centralized, one is not). Perhaps those two assets offer similar order of magnitude tradeoffs in terms of tail risk. In retrospect, putting the money in USDC (or Dai) or similar would have been a good course of action.
I realize this wasn't evident from my initial post, but I actually go back many years with crypto and have run both airgapped computers at home as well as used Trezors without mistake (including using Uniswap), so I'm less worried about losing my keys or committing other such user errors.
Ironically, while I used to worry more about using CEX's (thinking they could hacked, or the founders could run away with the money), over time I gravitated towards worrying more about actually getting my crypto money back into the banking system, without running afoul of AML / KYC hurdles, and I thought CEX's would be the less risky option in this regard.
And in this case specifically, once the money on FTX became sizable, I became even more paranoid about this, and I guess I got set in my own thinking of not wanting the money to leave the exchange for fear of not being able to transfer it back into the banking system.
In retrospect, it's funny (and obviously sad at the same time) how I overly worried about one thing, while completely missing out on what the real risk was.
You all have been extremely helpful, so I thank you very much (and not least for allowing me to put some of my thoughts in writing and reasoning with you about it). We live and learn -- now onto figuring out how to make up for the money lost!
Every approach has risks, and the right approach depends on the person. I'd never reccomend self custody for my mother (actually I'd never reccomend crypto for my mother) but if you have the technical skills and are personally responsible self custody might be safer than a cex. It also let's you take advantage of defi, which has a whole other set of risks and benefits.
