Crypto — Honest Pros and Cons
No hype, no dismissal — just a clear-eyed look at what crypto is and is not
Three Things at Once
Most discussions of cryptocurrency fail for the same reason: they try to answer "is crypto good or bad?" as if it were one question with one answer. It isn't. Crypto is simultaneously a genuine technological innovation with real, working use cases; a highly speculative asset class where the overwhelming majority of value is driven by expectations about future buyers rather than any underlying cash flow; and an environment with a higher concentration of outright scams than almost any other corner of modern finance. All three of these things are true at the same time, about the same broad space, and the honest way to think about crypto is to evaluate each of the three separately rather than collapsing them into a single verdict.
This chapter is deliberately the "verdict" companion to the mechanics covered in the cryptocurrency chapter elsewhere in this course. If you want to understand how blockchains, wallets, and exchanges actually work, that's covered there. This chapter assumes you broadly understand the mechanics and focuses on the harder, more useful question: given how it actually works, what should a sensible person conclude about whether and how to engage with it?
It's worth being explicit about why this separation matters rather than just folding everything into one combined chapter. Mechanics and verdict are genuinely different kinds of questions, and conflating them is part of why crypto discussions so often talk past each other. "How does a blockchain achieve consensus without a central authority" is a factual, answerable, mostly uncontested engineering question. "Should I put money into this, and how much" is a judgement call that depends on your own risk tolerance, financial situation, and view of an uncertain future — and pretending the second question has the same kind of clean, factual answer as the first is where a lot of both the hype and the blanket dismissal goes wrong.
The reason this framing matters practically is that people who go in expecting crypto to be purely one of these three things get burned in predictable ways. The person who treats it purely as "the future of money" overallocates and panics during the inevitable 70%+ drawdowns that have occurred multiple times in Bitcoin's history. The person who dismisses it entirely as "all a scam" misses that some underlying technology and use cases are real and have persisted for over fifteen years now. And almost everyone underestimates how much of the specific activity they'll encounter day to day — a token someone recommends, a DM from a "trading expert," a project promising guaranteed returns — falls into the third category: not innovation, not even honest speculation, just theft with extra steps.
The Legitimate Case
Strip away the price speculation entirely, and there are real, functioning use cases that have persisted for over a decade, which is long enough to say they're not purely a fad. Bitcoin has operated continuously since 2009 without the core network ever being successfully hacked, processing transactions globally without requiring a bank, a government, or a company's permission — genuinely useful in contexts with unstable local currencies, capital controls, or limited banking access, even if that's a smaller slice of real-world usage than crypto's total market value might suggest. Stablecoins, pegged to the US dollar, have become a genuinely significant piece of global financial infrastructure for moving dollar-equivalent value quickly and cheaply across borders, particularly in economies with currency instability or limited access to US dollar banking.
Ethereum's smart contract infrastructure underpins decentralised finance applications that, while far smaller and far less tested than traditional finance, do genuinely let people lend, borrow, and trade without a bank intermediary — a real technical achievement, even though the space has also hosted a disproportionate share of hacks and exploits relative to its size, a point covered further below. Blockchain-based settlement is also being explored seriously by traditional financial institutions for things like tokenised bonds and faster cross-border settlement — not retail crypto speculation, but a genuine application of the underlying technology by large, regulated players.
The Speculative Case
Set the technology aside and look purely at price behaviour, and crypto — Bitcoin especially — is honestly best understood as one of the most volatile speculative assets widely available to retail investors, full stop. Bitcoin has gone from under a dollar to roughly $69,000 at its November 2021 peak, then down to around $16,000 within about a year, then to new all-time highs again — a round trip that would be considered extraordinary in any other asset class and that has happened multiple times across its history, not once.
The crucial honesty required here: unlike a share, there is no earnings growth, dividend, or productive economic output underlying most of that price movement. The value of a bitcoin is, almost entirely, what the next buyer is willing to pay for it — a dynamic economists sometimes call a "greater fool" mechanism when there's no cash flow to anchor a valuation, though that term is more pejorative than the reality deserves, since scarcity and network effects are real economic properties too, just not the same kind of anchor an earnings report provides.
| Who tends to do reasonably well | Who tends to do badly |
|---|---|
| Early, patient holders who bought small amounts years ago and genuinely didn't need the money | Late entrants who buy heavily during a euphoric price spike, often with money they can't afford to lose |
| Investors who sized the position small enough (commonly cited: 1-5% of a portfolio) that a 70% drawdown doesn't threaten their financial plan | Investors who panic-sell during a crash, locking in the loss right before a recovery |
| Those who stuck to Bitcoin and Ethereum and avoided chasing newer, unproven tokens | Those who chased altcoins promoted by influencers or anonymous social media accounts |
The honest statistical reality is that most individual retail traders who actively trade crypto — buying and selling frequently, chasing momentum — underperform simply buying and holding a small, fixed allocation, a pattern that's well documented in traditional markets too but is magnified in crypto by the extreme volatility and the 24/7 trading that makes constant monitoring and emotional decision-making easier to fall into.
It's also worth being honest about survivorship bias in how crypto success stories typically get told. The handful of people who bought Bitcoin for a few dollars in 2011 and held for a decade make for a compelling story precisely because they are rare — a tiny fraction of everyone who has ever bought cryptocurrency, set against the far larger number of people who bought during a later, higher peak and are still underwater years on, or who bought an altcoin that has since gone to zero entirely. The stories that circulate widely are disproportionately the extreme winners, not a representative sample of typical outcomes, which is true of lottery winners too and doesn't make lotteries a sound financial strategy.
The Scam Landscape
This is the part of crypto that deserves the least ambiguity of the three. The combination of irreversible transactions, pseudonymous ownership, genuine technical complexity that most buyers don't fully understand, and an environment where extraordinary, fast gains are a real (if rare) possibility has made crypto an unusually attractive hunting ground for fraud, and the scale of it is well documented rather than anecdotal.
Beyond large-scale exchange fraud, several specific scam patterns recur constantly enough to be worth naming explicitly: rug pulls, where developers launch a new token, hype it heavily (sometimes with paid influencer promotion), then abruptly withdraw all the liquidity and disappear, leaving buyers holding a worthless token; pig butchering scams, a particularly cruel long-con where scammers build a romantic or friendly relationship over weeks or months before persuading the victim to invest in a fake crypto platform, often targeting isolated or vulnerable individuals and extracting life savings; fake investment platforms promising guaranteed, unrealistic returns (anything above roughly 10-20% annually with "guaranteed" attached should be treated as an immediate red flag); and impersonation scams involving fake customer support, fake celebrity endorsements, or cloned exchange websites designed to harvest login details or seed phrases.
The UK's own Action Fraud and the FCA have repeatedly flagged crypto investment fraud as one of the fastest-growing categories of financial fraud reported by UK consumers in recent years, with total reported losses running into hundreds of millions of pounds annually across various reporting periods — a figure that likely understates the true total given how many victims don't report, often out of embarrassment.
Red Flags Checklist
Most crypto scams share a recognisable pattern. Before sending any money, treat any of the following as a serious warning sign:
- Guaranteed or unusually high returns — no legitimate investment, crypto or otherwise, can guarantee a specific high return. "Guaranteed 20% a month" is theft, not an opportunity.
- Pressure to act immediately — genuine opportunities don't disappear in the next hour. Urgency is a manipulation tactic, not a feature of a sound investment.
- Someone you've only met online asking you to invest — particularly a new romantic or friendly contact who gradually steers conversation toward a specific trading platform or token.
- Being asked for your seed phrase or private key by "support" — no legitimate wallet, exchange, or service will ever need this. Anyone asking for it is attempting theft.
- A token or platform with no clear, checkable team, code, or purpose — anonymous founders and vague whitepapers are common in both genuine early-stage projects and outright scams, which is exactly why it's a weak signal on its own but a red flag when combined with aggressive marketing.
- Difficulty withdrawing funds — a platform that processes deposits instantly but delays, taxes, or blocks withdrawals with shifting excuses is a strong sign the funds are gone.
- Celebrity or influencer endorsement with no other substance — paid promotion is common and does not constitute due diligence or evidence of legitimacy.
How to Think About Allocation, If at All
Given all three realities above — real technology, genuine speculation, and a dense scam landscape — the question most people actually need answered is practical: should I hold any, and if so, how much? There's no universally correct answer, but there is a sensible framework.
| Situation | Reasonable approach |
|---|---|
| No emergency fund, carrying high-interest debt | Zero crypto allocation. Build the financial foundation first — nothing here is time-sensitive in a way that justifies skipping it. |
| Solid financial foundation, genuinely curious, comfortable with the risk | A small position, commonly cited at 1-5% of total investable assets, concentrated in Bitcoin and possibly Ethereum, held for years rather than traded actively. |
| Strong conviction, high risk tolerance, financially secure regardless of outcome | A somewhat larger position is a personal choice, but treat anything beyond roughly 10% as a deliberate, informed bet rather than a balanced portfolio decision. |
| Any amount in individual altcoins beyond Bitcoin/Ethereum | Treat as a separate, smaller "high-risk within high-risk" bucket, sized assuming total loss is a realistic outcome. |
The single most important rule, repeated across every serious piece of guidance on this topic for good reason: never invest money you cannot afford to lose completely. This isn't hedge-language caution — Bitcoin has genuinely fallen 70-93% from peak to trough on multiple occasions across its history, and there is no guarantee any specific recovery happens on any specific timeline, or at all for a given altcoin. Position sizing that assumes the position could go to zero, and that you'd be financially fine if it did, is the only honest way to hold crypto.
UK Regulatory Status
Cryptocurrency is legal to own and trade in the UK, but the regulatory framework around it is still maturing and has tightened meaningfully in recent years. Firms offering crypto exchange or custody services to UK customers must register with the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) for anti-money-laundering purposes — a baseline requirement, not full financial services authorisation, so it does not carry the same consumer protections as an FCA-regulated investment product.
The FCA has taken an increasingly active stance on retail-facing crypto risk specifically: it banned the sale of crypto derivatives (futures, options, exchange-traded notes tied to crypto) to retail consumers in 2021, citing the combination of extreme volatility, valuation difficulty, and the prevalence of financial crime in the sector. From late 2023, UK firms promoting crypto to retail customers have had to comply with stricter financial promotion rules, including mandatory risk warnings, a cooling-off period for first-time investors, and a ban on incentives like "refer a friend" bonuses specifically designed to encourage impulsive investment.
Crypto cannot currently be held inside a standard UK Stocks and Shares ISA directly. Some SIPPs (self-invested personal pensions) permit indirect exposure through regulated instruments such as Bitcoin futures-based ETFs, but most mainstream pension providers do not support direct crypto holdings, and the regulatory picture here continues to evolve. Gains are subject to Capital Gains Tax exactly as described in the mechanics chapter — every disposal, including crypto-to-crypto swaps, is a taxable event requiring careful record-keeping.
Comparing Crypto to Other Speculative Assets
It's useful to place crypto's risk profile alongside other recognisable speculative assets rather than treating it as entirely sui generis. Buying a single small-cap growth stock with no profits, or a concentrated bet on a specific sector theme, carries some genuinely similar characteristics to buying an altcoin: both are driven heavily by narrative and future expectation rather than current cash flow, both can produce extraordinary gains or near-total losses, and both reward position sizing discipline far more than they reward conviction.
Where crypto differs meaningfully from most traditional speculative assets is in the surrounding infrastructure risk. A small-cap stock, however speculative, trades on a regulated exchange with disclosure requirements, audited accounts, and compensation schemes covering the broker holding it. Crypto, particularly outside Bitcoin and Ethereum, often lacks all three — audited financials are rare to nonexistent for most tokens, disclosure is voluntary at best, and the custodial protections that exist in traditional markets largely don't apply. This is why the "red flags" and "scam landscape" sections above carry disproportionate weight compared to equivalent sections in a chapter about, say, small-cap stocks — the fraud risk genuinely is higher per pound invested in much of the crypto space, even setting aside the legitimate price volatility.
A useful comparison is gambling at a casino, not because crypto is literally gambling, but because the honest framing helps with sizing decisions: most people who gamble recreationally set a fixed amount they're comfortable losing entirely, enjoy the experience, and stop when that amount is gone, rather than borrowing more to chase a loss back. Applying exactly that discipline to a speculative crypto position — a fixed amount you've mentally already written off as a cost of participating, not money you're relying on being there later — removes much of the danger that comes from treating it as a core financial plan instead of a bounded, optional bet.
A Pattern Worth Recognising: Boom, Bust, Repeat
Crypto has now been through enough complete cycles that the pattern itself is worth studying as honestly as any individual asset within it. The 2017 cycle was dominated by Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) — thousands of new tokens launched on the back of little more than a whitepaper and a promise, raising billions of dollars from retail investors caught up in the enthusiasm, with the large majority of those projects later delivering nothing and their tokens becoming worthless. The 2020-2021 cycle introduced "DeFi summer" and the NFT boom described earlier in this course, again featuring genuine innovation (decentralised lending and trading protocols that do work) alongside enormous amounts of speculative excess and outright fraud, before a sharp, prolonged decline through 2022 that included the TerraUSD stablecoin collapse and the FTX implosion within months of each other.
Recognising this cyclical pattern doesn't tell you when the next boom or bust will happen — nobody has reliably timed any of these cycles in advance, including plenty of people who claimed to. What it does usefully tell you is that extreme enthusiasm (a rapid run-up in prices, a flood of new, untested projects, widespread claims that "this time it's different") has historically been followed by a sharp correction, repeatedly, across more than one full cycle now. Treating a period of extreme hype as a reason for increased caution rather than increased urgency to buy is a lesson the market has taught, often painfully, more than once.
Institutional Adoption: A Genuine Shift, With Caveats
One of the more significant developments in recent crypto history is the growing involvement of mainstream financial institutions, which is worth weighing honestly rather than treating as either total vindication or irrelevant noise. In January 2024, the US Securities and Exchange Commission approved the first spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds, allowing major asset managers including BlackRock and Fidelity to offer regulated, exchange-traded products that hold actual Bitcoin on behalf of investors — a meaningful step toward mainstream accessibility that didn't exist in earlier cycles, removing much of the self-custody and exchange-counterparty risk covered elsewhere in this chapter for investors who use these products instead of buying crypto directly.
Some public companies have also added Bitcoin to their corporate balance sheets as a treasury asset, the most prominent example being MicroStrategy (later rebranded Strategy), which has accumulated a very large Bitcoin holding through repeated purchases since 2020. El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender in 2021, the first country to do so, though its practical adoption for everyday payments domestically has been limited according to independent surveys, even as the government has continued accumulating Bitcoin as a national reserve asset.
The honest caveat: institutional adoption and regulatory approval of investment products are evidence that crypto has become harder to dismiss entirely and easier to access safely through regulated channels — they are not evidence that the underlying volatility has gone away, or that any specific price level is justified. A Bitcoin ETF makes it easier and safer to hold a position; it does not make Bitcoin itself any less likely to fall 50% or more in a given year, a pattern that has persisted through every previous stage of institutional interest so far.
A Worked Comparison: Disciplined vs Undisciplined Approaches
To make the allocation framework above concrete, consider two people, each starting with £10,000 of investable savings beyond their emergency fund, both deciding to hold some Bitcoin.
Investor A allocates 3% — £300 — into Bitcoin, leaving the remaining £9,700 in a diversified ISA portfolio of global equities and bonds. Bitcoin then falls 70% over the following eighteen months, a magnitude that has happened more than once in its history. Investor A's crypto position falls to £90 — a real loss, but one that reduces their total portfolio value by only about 2%, barely noticeable against the normal month-to-month movement of the diversified portfolio sitting alongside it. Because the position was never large enough to threaten their financial plan, Investor A doesn't panic-sell, and simply continues holding both positions as originally planned.
Investor B, excited by a friend's stories of quick gains, puts the full £10,000 into a mix of Bitcoin and two newer altcoins recommended in an online forum, borrowing an additional £5,000 on a credit card to "maximise the opportunity." The same 70% Bitcoin decline hits, and the altcoins — carrying higher volatility than Bitcoin itself, as is typical — fall by 90% or more. Investor B's £15,000 position is now worth roughly £2,000, a loss that represents both their entire investable savings and a £5,000 debt still accruing interest, with no diversified portfolio cushioning the blow. The emotional and financial pressure to sell at the bottom, crystallising the loss permanently, is immense — and well documented as exactly what a large share of retail investors in this position actually do.
Both investors experienced the same market event. The outcome diverged entirely based on position sizing, diversification, and the decision not to use borrowed money — none of which required any skill at predicting where Bitcoin's price would go next. This is, in miniature, the entire argument of this chapter: the honest risks of crypto are real and well documented, but they are manageable with discipline that has nothing to do with picking the right coin or the right moment.
The Psychology Crypto Markets Specifically Exploit
Crypto markets have a few structural features that make emotionally driven decisions more likely than in traditional markets, and recognising them in advance is a genuine practical defence. The market trades continuously, 24 hours a day, every day of the year, with no scheduled close the way stock exchanges have — this means there is always a live price to check, always a fresh reason to feel like you're missing out on a move or need to react to one, and no built-in pause that forces a cooling-off period the way an overnight market close does for traditional investors.
Social media amplifies this further. Crypto discussion is unusually concentrated on platforms optimised for fast-moving, emotionally charged content, and the combination of anonymous accounts, genuine enthusiasts, and paid promoters makes it difficult to distinguish a balanced view from a self-interested one — someone heavily invested in a token has an obvious incentive to generate exactly the kind of urgent, excited content that drives others to buy, pushing the price up in their own favour, at least temporarily.
The Honest Verdict
Crypto is not "the future of money" in the way its most enthusiastic proponents claim, and it is not "worthless" in the way its harshest critics claim. Both of those positions require ignoring evidence that's inconvenient to them. Bitcoin has operated securely for over fifteen years and has a real, if narrow, case as a scarce digital asset. Ethereum's smart contract infrastructure does real computational work that traditional finance is beginning to experiment with seriously. At the same time, the price of almost every crypto asset is driven overwhelmingly by speculation rather than cash flow, volatility is extreme even by speculative-asset standards, and the scam density in the space is genuinely higher than in almost any comparable corner of finance.
The sensible, honest position for most people: treat crypto, if you engage with it at all, as a small, clearly bounded speculative position sized so that total loss wouldn't meaningfully affect your financial plan — not as a core holding, not as a replacement for a diversified investment portfolio, and not as something to actively trade based on short-term price movements. Build your financial foundation first (an emergency fund, manageable debt, a pension, a diversified ISA portfolio), and only then consider whether a small, deliberate crypto allocation adds anything you actually want, with eyes fully open to all three of the realities covered in this chapter.
None of this requires resolving the bigger philosophical question of whether Bitcoin eventually becomes a globally significant monetary asset or fades into a smaller niche over the coming decades — reasonable, well-informed people hold genuinely different views on that question, and nothing in this chapter is intended to settle it either way. What can be settled, with reasonable confidence based on everything covered above, is how a sensible person should behave given that uncertainty: size any position small enough to survive being wrong, verify custody and counterparty risk carefully, stay alert to the specific and well-documented scam patterns in this space, and resist treating either extreme hype or extreme dismissal as a substitute for actually thinking it through.
FAQs
Is crypto a scam?
Not entirely, and not uniformly. The underlying blockchain technology behind Bitcoin and Ethereum is real and has operated securely for over fifteen years. However, the space also contains a disproportionately high concentration of outright fraud — rug pulls, fake platforms, and romance scams — compared to most other areas of finance. The honest answer requires separating the legitimate technology from the specific project or platform being considered.
Is Bitcoin a good long-term investment?
It depends heavily on your time horizon and genuine ability to tolerate extreme volatility. Bitcoin has fallen 70-93% from peak to trough multiple times in its history, each time eventually recovering to new highs, but with no guarantee this pattern continues. If you would panic-sell during a severe crash, the honest answer is that it is not a good fit for you regardless of its long-term potential.
How much of my portfolio should be in crypto?
Most reasonable frameworks suggest 1-5% of total investable assets for those who want exposure, concentrated in Bitcoin and possibly Ethereum, treated as a bet you could lose entirely without it affecting your financial plan. This assumes a solid financial foundation (emergency fund, manageable debt, retirement saving) is already in place first.
What happened with FTX and why does it matter?
FTX, one of the world's largest crypto exchanges, secretly used customer deposits to cover losses at an affiliated trading firm. It collapsed within about 72 hours once this became public in November 2022, with roughly $8 billion in customer funds missing. It matters because it demonstrates that custodial risk — trusting a company to hold your crypto safely — is a real, demonstrated danger distinct from any flaw in the underlying blockchain technology.
What is a rug pull?
A scam where developers launch and heavily promote a new token, then abruptly withdraw all the funds backing its liquidity and disappear, leaving buyers holding a token that has become essentially worthless overnight. It is one of the most common fraud patterns in the newer-token segment of the crypto market.
Can I hold crypto in a UK ISA?
No, not directly in a standard Stocks and Shares ISA. Some SIPPs allow indirect exposure through regulated instruments like crypto futures-based ETFs, but most mainstream UK pension and ISA providers do not support direct cryptocurrency holdings.
Is crypto regulated in the UK?
Partially. Firms offering crypto services to UK customers must register with the FCA for anti-money-laundering purposes, and the FCA has banned crypto derivatives for retail customers and introduced stricter promotion rules since 2023. This is a narrower form of oversight than full financial services regulation, and crypto holdings are not covered by the Financial Services Compensation Scheme.
What should I do if someone online asks me to invest in crypto with them?
Treat it as a near-certain scam, particularly if the relationship developed online and gradually moved toward a specific trading platform or token — this matches the well-documented "pig butchering" scam pattern. Never send money to an investment opportunity introduced by someone you have not met in person and independently verified.
Why is crypto considered riskier than a speculative stock?
Partly for the same reasons any speculative asset is risky — no reliable cash-flow anchor, high volatility — but also because much of the crypto space lacks the audited financials, mandatory disclosure, and compensation scheme protections that apply to stocks traded on a regulated exchange, making the fraud risk meaningfully higher per pound invested.
Do I have to pay UK tax if I swap one crypto for another without ever cashing out?
Yes. HMRC treats a crypto-to-crypto swap as a taxable disposal for Capital Gains Tax purposes, the same as selling for pounds, even though no money reaches a bank account. Careful record-keeping of every transaction is required.
Are stablecoins safer than Bitcoin?
They carry a different risk, not necessarily a lower one. Stablecoins aim to avoid Bitcoin's price volatility, but their safety depends entirely on what backs them — a stablecoin backed by genuine cash reserves is far more reliable than an algorithmic one, as TerraUSD's 2022 collapse demonstrated when its algorithmic peg failed and wiped out tens of billions of dollars within days.
What is the single biggest red flag in a crypto investment opportunity?
A guaranteed or unusually high promised return. No legitimate investment of any kind can guarantee a specific high return, and this single claim, more than any other, correlates with outright fraud across the crypto space.
Has crypto been through boom and bust cycles before?
Yes, at least twice in full: the 2017 ICO boom, where thousands of new tokens raised billions of dollars before most became worthless, and the 2020-2021 DeFi and NFT boom, which was followed by a sharp decline through 2022 including the TerraUSD stablecoin collapse and the FTX implosion within months of each other.
Does the approval of Bitcoin ETFs in the US mean crypto is now safe?
No. Spot Bitcoin ETFs, approved by the US SEC in January 2024, make it easier and safer to gain exposure through a regulated product without self-custody or exchange-counterparty risk, but they do not reduce Bitcoin's underlying price volatility. It can still fall sharply even when held through a regulated ETF.
Is it true that a country made Bitcoin legal tender?
Yes. El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender in 2021, the first country to do so, though independent surveys suggest everyday domestic adoption for payments has remained limited, even as the government has continued to accumulate Bitcoin as a reserve asset.
Key takeaways
- Crypto is simultaneously real technology, a genuinely speculative asset class, and an environment with a high concentration of scams — evaluate each of the three separately rather than reaching for one overall verdict.
- Bitcoin and Ethereum have real, documented use cases and over fifteen years of continuous operation; most individual altcoins eventually trade to near zero.
- FTX's 2022 collapse ($8bn in missing customer funds) demonstrates that custodial risk on exchanges is a real, proven danger distinct from any flaw in the underlying blockchain.
- Guaranteed or unusually high promised returns, urgency, and requests for your seed phrase are the clearest, most consistent signs of a scam.
- Build your financial foundation — emergency fund, manageable debt, pension, diversified ISA — before considering any crypto allocation at all.
- If you do invest, a small position (commonly 1-5% of investable assets) in Bitcoin and possibly Ethereum, sized assuming total loss is possible, is the sensible default rather than active trading or chasing altcoins.
- UK crypto regulation has tightened since 2023 (derivative bans, stricter promotion rules) but crypto still carries no FSCS protection and cannot be held directly in a standard ISA.