#1 – If your coins are on an exchange, you need permission from the exchange to spend them. In your own custody, you can do whatever you want and pay whomever you want, whenever you want, at the fee you want.

#2 – Your coins might not really be there. What you see is a promise that if you ask for your bitcoin, they will give it to you. But if the exchange gets hacked or if the CEO fakes his death and takes the private keys or if the government steps in, all coins could go bye-bye.

#3 – If coins are left on the exchange, they can engage in fractional reserve lending, effectively inflating the supply of bitcoin. If there is a mass withdrawal by the public, exchanges can and have gone bust if they don’t have the coins that were promised. Coins go bye-bye.

#4 – One day governments may outlaw withdrawals to private wallets, leaving your coins stuck and vastly less valuable. The real bitcoin economy would consist of the open peer-to-peer market outside of the exchanges while the coins trapped inside exchanges would be useless.

#5 – Powerful people who want Bitcoin to fail MAY be naked shorting it on futures markets. If we, The Resistance, buy bitcoin and extract it from the trading pool, we will eventually enforce a decoupling of the price of paper bitcoin vs physical bitcoin.

#6 Unless you take coins into your own custody, you will never fully appreciate how Bitcoin works.