Topic: Bitcoin OGs, Can We Please Practice What we Preach? - page 2. (Read 384 times)

If you actually think people like Snowden practice perfect Security every single minute of their life 24 out of 7 for 365 days in a continuous loop you are very wrong.  It is so easy to preach and give advice but practice gets difficult.  Perfect Bitcoin Security means more than just owning a Hardware Wallet.

You have got to take care of how you store your Seed.  Secure enough to avoid theft AND eventual disasters.  You have got to take care of the devices you use.  Even if Ledger praises their Hardware Wallets as impossible to penetrate even in the most virused up computer, this does not mean you can have a fully virused computer laying around and plugging your Ledger into it with no care.

You have got to take care of Cryptocurrency affecting viruses too.  The infamous Clipboard virus.  The fake Electrum version virus.  And so on.  Still got to check that Address fully to make sure it is going to the correct Address.  Check the sum two times at least to make sure they are right.

Reality is different.  Most Bitcoiners only check first and last few characters of an Address plus the middle ones.  Most Bitcoiners hold more than they would risk in a Hot Wallet.  Most Bitcoiners probably have their Seed written down on a piece of paper that is erasable, can ignite, can be destroyed by water and ripped by a dog.  Many Bitcoiners do have a Hardware Wallet but do not manage their funds in a way close to perfection.

It is hard to practice what you preach.  And you are always hit very strong by guilt when you realize being lazy was a big mistake.

Hope this guy is well.  I would be more afraid of his thoughts and mental health than about his loss.

I don't use hardware wallet because I use cold storage setup with my ancient PC that runs live Linux and is not used for anything else and is never connected to the Internet. I transfer transaction in via USB stick and out by scanning a QR code on watch-only wallet. It's very unlikely that there is a malware that can bypass all these obstacles and that I will encounter this malware somehow.

Poor guy, such a loss after 11 years of hodling! But yeah, if we think about it, there are some many ways to lose your coins, probably hundreds. Hardware wallet is a good solution for the safety of your coins, you could also use an air-gapped pc for this purpose. No storage is completely safe, you should always be careful in any case not to fall for phishing or some social engineering hacks.   

Yes, and so it's more on the OP side here, maybe he was just overconfident that he doesn't need a hardware wallet although he has preached it. I think majority here, maybe because we really don't hold that much bitcoin or we have a hard time acquiring it, we seldom uses hardware wallet.

But in any case, security should be the priority here. Maybe we can start with Electrum only wallet and then gradually learn the best securities out there, like air gapped PC, muti-sig or hardware wallet. And then back up all the seed and private key. And again, we should just keep quiet about our bitcoin because we are also not safe by criminals that might attack us physically in real world.

Right, as I have said that even you have the hardware wallet it gives some strength and security but if you are careless just like this guy
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Fake Ledger Live app in Microsoft Store steals $768,000 in crypto

That doesn't make sense for you to own one when you don't know where you should download the outright app for your hardware wallet.

There are many different ways to keep your bitcoin safe. We have the  hardware wallets, cold storage, and multi-sig. While software wallet is good there is a strong caution given against leaving funds on software wallets on phones or computers due to security vulnerabilities. Hardware wallets are recommended as the only secure option for self-custody.

LOL, like it is for real and it doesn't want to be owned by someone who really don't give the care and security that it deserves.

Yeah, not the end of his world but he'll surely be having hard time of getting up and starting to pull everything together. Resiliency of a person depends on how optimistic he is and if he's not like that, he'll dwell on this situation of being sorry and regret for a long time. I guess a week or even a month of sorrow is just fine and enough but if it takes longer, he does need to seek some professional help or not even from the professionals but to get and ask support from his immediate family.

And that percentage of people including the institutions admitting that they're trusting more the exchanges. I have read an article about that admission but I can't find it anymore.

Welp. You play stupid games, you win stupid prizes.

Pretty sure everyone who preaches about getting their hardware wallets, or at the very least dividing your assets among different unconnected wallets do that to a T, so I don’t think you need to question the validity of that statement on our part. And while it must suck for this guy considering that’s money he’s been keeping for more than a decade, it must’ve crossed his mind to buy cold wallets in the past, ultimately not answering to it of course, which lead to repercussions.

Hopefully he learns something from this, it sucks to lose your money willy-nilly but at the same time, this could’ve been avoided for 30 bucks at least,

Op, thanks for this information and it is good that we are not hypocrites in our words and do the opposite. The dunny thing is that a hardware wallet is hard to see in my country and I don't think that I will be able to buy one. I still believe that it is very easy to get an old computer and use it as a cold storage wallet and generate your seed on offline and never connect that computer to the internet, since it still serve the same purpose of a hardware wallet.

Since bitcoin gave is the opportunity to be our own bank then our wallet security lies in our hands, and this is why one must take wallet safety very serious to avoid the loss of your bitcoin. A word is enough for a wise because nobody is safe, but when you are careful and do the right thing, you can be safe from these hackers.

Your friend is a trader and I bet he is trading those funds stashed in an exchange.  He was not hacked but rather got defraud by the company he trusted.  He has not lost his holdings if the company he trusted did not scam him.

And that is the main problem of a trader, since the fund is actively trading, it is actually an extra expenses and time that might cause the trader a delay and may lost a possible profit from a trade if he put his fund in a cold storage then send it to exchange when the trading get crazy.  I have such kind of experience when I am holding Bitcoin and the altcoin I am watching gets a momentary dump, so I send BTC to the exchange but the moment it confirms, the momentary dump were taken advantage by other people whose fund is already on the exchange.

On the other hand holding is different.  The fund is idle so there is actually no reason to stash it on exchanges.  The idle fund should be securely stash in an offline wallet, and yes much better if it is on an air-gapped device especially if we plan to hold it for decades.

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About the incident, I feel sorry for the person but he should be the first one using a hardware wallet when he is preaching newbies to use one.  His experience is a good lesson for us to learn something.  It is a message that no matter how confident we are on securing out wallet if it is connected on the internet, there is no assurance that it is safe forever.  Lesson learned that keeping Bitcoin in an offline storage or using a hardware wallet while keeping the back up in a safe place that is water and fire proof is much better.

You have point out an important things. It's actually a reality that most people suggest using hardware wallets to stay secure even though most of them don't use hardware wallets. However, there may be valid reasons such as many not importing hardware wallets simply because cryptocurrency and all its related devices are illegal in their country. This reality is happening to me. But since I haven't been able to use it currently I wouldn't suggest it to people as it just doesn't look right to me, I have and will continue to suggest others use the hardware to make those investment more secure.

Indeed,,,,, I myself was a victim of phishing last year which hacked cryptocurrency from some of my hot wallets. And I also think that it is not only the hot wallet holders who will be victims of this kind of hacking.  Those who use hardware wallets should also be aware of this because the environment that the hardware wallet will be connected to must be free of malware, otherwise it may become vulnerable later on.

I can tell you with a loud voice that out of 100% bitcoin holders 40% of us do not own a reliable storage where our bitcoin can not be touched or hacked by anyone untill it happens to any one of us before we could know that we need to buy one and store in our funds.

I can recall a friend of mine then I was telling him to moved out his fund from exchange though he is a trader and he only moves his funds from exchange to exchange he doesn't own a none custodial wallet and when I told him he said he doesn't have time to store his asset in a wallet. He was saying it's additional fee moving funds around wallet instead he prefers sending to exchange where he do have new signal to trade but unfortunately he was among the FTX scandal and I knew he learnt in a hard way.

I can't blame him. When btc wants to get away from you, it does. I somehow know the feeling. It sucks to lose 25btc but it is not the end of the world. If he keeps being sorry about it, some health problems will follow and that's when he'll realize he shouldn't have given too many fucks about it. Many people despise legacy banking and financial markets but bitcoin etf's (or trust funds or whichever is available nowadays) like grayscale come handy in these situations.

People should indeed own their private keys/seed words but not everybody has to. Especially If you are only interested in the price of bitcoin, there is no need to hold too many coins in your hard/paper/soft/cold/whatever wallet. Funds like GBTC will take care of it and you can never lose your coins that way.

I feel sorry for this guy. You can see he's been crying and not getting too much sleep. If he's making this up he should become an actor because he's great at this.
Anyway, I don't get why he'd store seed phrases in a password manager. It's just a step more secure than holding it in your email or on google drive.
I don't use a hardware wallet at the moment, but I've always had an airgapped machine that holds all my .dat files and I don't even have seeds for these wallets, just good old password protected files stored on a computer that gets powered up once or twice a year and is small enough for me to carry out of the building in case of flood or fire. I also have a spare backup drive in case something happened with the main computer and that one is well hidden, so it's theft-proof. For small transactions I have my desktop wallet that's online all the time and stores coins I get from signature campaigns. It's a risk, but a risk I'm willing to take for the sake of convenience.

not the first time..
luke Jr lost some last christmas..

Yeah, seeing that video was definitely disturbing! It is crazy how we can start feeling invincible in crypto until someone we think is an expert gets hacked.  Goes to show that we all gotta stay vigilant no matter how long we have been in the game.  Probably good for me to brush up on keeping my holdings secure.  Cant get lazy...  The world is full of bandits ready to snatch your goods!

Thanks for the nudge, OP, to make sure my wallet is locked up tight.  Better paranoid than sorry when it comes to protecting my investment.

This is what I was thinking as well, a hardware wallet without a doubt is a practical device for those that do not really know how to secure their computers and coins on their own, but if you have an old laptop lying around and you install Linux in it, keep it updated, keep it offline and you only use it when you want to make a transaction then you can get the same functionality than a hardware wallet, however if a person does not really think they can do all of that then they could go through the hardware wallet route and keep their coins secure that way.

That's sad and he's been so long holding and yet he never taken a hardware wallet for himself? You're right that everyone should practice what we're preaching if we tell people to hardware wallet and then we don't even have it, you're helping others but not yourself.

But if a newbie just known that hardware wallets are good way to store our Bitcoin and he advises that while having no hardware wallet yet, I think that's fine as it's just sharing knowledge and soon that person might own one then.

Aside from advising to own hardware wallets, we must also check out how we are browsing the web. With our activities, it is the mainly reason how we become vulnerable.

I think the right advice should be get yourself a cold wallet, hardware wallet isn’t the only cold or offline wallet. You can safely set up an offline wallet on airgapped device and it will work same as an hardware wallet.

Also hardware wallet or probably all cold wallet isn’t just the problem but also how we back up our seed phrase or keys. Even with hardware wallet if you don’t store your seeds properly it will still be needless.

Based on a recent incident I came across on X, I have realized that a lot of us don't actually practice what we preach when it comes to the safest way to hold bitcoins securely.

Many of us, the Bitcoin OGs are quick to advice newbies to get a hardware wallet, that it is the best way to hold bitcoin and other supported crypto assets securely, but coming back to ourselves, many of us don't do the same, probably out of over confidence in ourselves that our wallet can never be hacked due to our already vast knowledge in crypto.

I am making this thread to let us all know that nobody is safe, be you an OG or newbie, you need to get yourself a hardware wallet if you must hold your bitcoins and other crypto assets with rest of mind.

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I came across a post from this dude on twitter whose bitcoin wallet was hacked, and all BTC25+ held since 2012 he said belonged to him and his father were all stolen, this is one lost that will be very hard to get over, holding 25+ bitcoins since 2012 and just one day, in a twinkle of an eye, it's all gone.

Anyways, in a 5 minutes video he posted on X which i will share below, he did mention always advising people to get a hardware wallet and store their bitcoins on it, meanwhile he himself doesn't own or use one, due to his confidence that he could never be hacked, but unfortunately, it happened, he got hacked.

This is something for us all to learn from, nobody is an expert when it comes to online security of your bitcoin and your funds, get a hardware wallet today to significantly increase the safety of your funds.

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Here the link to tweet on X - https://x.com/RMessitt/status/1723141037856596175?s=20

Click the shot to watch his 5 minutes video also on X..