I'm thinking about buying some bitcoins but I'm scared of losing the money. I saw there are cold wallets like Ledger but I don't know if they're really safe or if it's better to leave them on the exchange. Does anyone have experience with this?
Cold wallets like Ledger are way more secure than leaving your bitcoins on an exchange, because you control the private keys and it doesn't depend on the platform's server getting hacked. The main risk is losing your recovery phrase or the device itself, but that's on you and not on third parties. If you're buying a few bitcoins and want to sleep soundly, a cold wallet is worth it; if it's a small amount you're gonna use soon, a regulated exchange works too, but historically exchanges have had more security problems than offline devices.
Key control is definitely important, yeah, but it's not a silver bullet either. A cold wallet like Ledger is pretty safe against remote hacks because the device stays offline, but you've gotta be really careful about where you store your seed phrase and not lose it, because if you do it's game over for your access and nobody can get it back for you. The realistic take is that a cold wallet is secure if you're actually responsible yourself; if you're terrible at keeping important things safe, at least an exchange has protections if they get hacked, even though obviously you're betting they won't.
Do you have a clear sense of how willing you are to lose the device or recovery seed? Because honestly, a cold wallet like Ledger is way more secure than leaving it on an exchange (that's already been said), but the real risk isn't remote hacking - it's you losing access yourself - forgetting the password, the device breaking without a backup, or something happening to the piece of paper where you wrote down the seed. That happens more often than people admit.
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