Topic: Greater Control and Security Features often Come Greater Responsibilities (Read 199 times)

In the crypto space, security and privacy are paramount; it doesn't necessarily require too much responsibility for one to take security precautions in order not to lose their asset. Just as investing in Bitcoin is so easy and swift, any Bitcoiner should see handling their security as something that is easy and not something that they must force with too much energy. Naturally, some people are very lazy in handling security, and it doesn't require much of you to just be very protective of your security. During the time I ventured into Bitcoin, there was a guy who also invested in Bitcoin, but just after a short period of time, he lost access to his wallet and couldn't find where he stored his wallet private key, and that's just how he lost his fund. That's how some people can just be careless for no reason.

I love the slogan "with greater control comes greater responsibilities" and as we all have decided to be a part of this industry, we owe it to ourselves to make the most out of it and we can't do that without having our asset secured. If we don't take our privacy seriously, we'll lose our assets (coins) to hackers. When it comes to the securing of our seed phrase, I still prefer writing it on a piece of paper and storing that piece of paper in a secured location (like a vault) that isn't accessable to the public. Storing of seed phrase on any device that has connection to the internet or in our emails is the worst mistake ever because that means you're just one mistake away from losing your coins as you can't be too careful not to expose your device to virus/malware that can be used to gained access to your device.


This is the reason why we have lots of users still trusting exchanges and centralized service providers but that shouldn't be the norm because we are moving away from having third parties to run our business to doing it ourselves which is what Bitcoin is all about. We have to learn to be incharge and not give power back to those we're trying to take control from. Been in charge of our finances is empowering and we have to learn to accept that responsibility by been security conscious. Been your own bank isn't that hard but people don't have confidence that they can protect their own wealth and that's why they look for others to take responsibility for them.

Freedom and decentralization come with a lot of responsibility. But it will be better to have control over my investment than to put it in the hands of people I don't know. The risk of keeping my wallet safe is lesser than putting it in the control of people like Sam Bankman-Fried.

There are some threads in which the OP gives stories of how they spoke to people about Bitcoin and they immediately bought the idea and invested in the sector because of profit-making. I think these teachings are incomplete without security knowledge. If you teach people about making money and don't teach them how to protect their investments, you may have just shown them how to lose their money cheaply.

That thread is a compendium of relevant materials that everyone should read. It has information on many aspects of security and the good part about it is that it is updated monthly.

Although it entails a lot of responsibility, protecting your finances is well worth the effort. Nobody wants to have someone else steal their money, especially when there are preventative steps that can be taken against such. Because there are those waiting for our small mistakes, they can take advantage of them and steal our money, we cannot afford to let our guard down. Others are ignorant and don't seek out information while some people are just inherently lazy and don't even have the time to look into safety measures, let alone execute them so it's on them when they lose their assets.

Securing your assets should be your first priority after purchasing them, it wouldn’t be your anymore if it’s not in your control, especially for cryptocurrencies, they are decentralized and by so it is controlled by its owner and if there is any case of theft therebis no one to complain to and your coins are gone forever. That’s why we have to take security and control measures seriously because if you don’t no one would do that for you.

All because people are lazy. We are so accustomed to conveniences, from delivery from online stores to buying air tickets via the Internet. To think that no one else will be able to answer for the loss of their money is not accessible to everyone. If an error occurs in bank transactions, people can always appeal it, but with the storage and use of cryptocurrency, everything falls on the shoulders of the owner.

What is needed for this? It's all about growing up. Understand that the Internet is not a kind grandmother who will do everything herself and who can be trusted unquestioningly; on the contrary, this is a place where you need to be very careful.

Who read the story about how a blogger exposed his seed phrase while broadcasting on YouTube and lost 60 thousand dollars? What this suggests is that even experienced people sometimes make mistakes that have dire consequences.

One piece of advice: learn all the intricacies of storage and use, and never lose vigilance.


It's time to attach Ratimov's encyclopedia, one topic replaces thousands of unnecessary questions.

The thing is how many members are implementing what they read here? The self custody topic has been discussed many times but we still see people saying exchanges are good and safe inspite of so many attacks and these centralized platforms becoming insolvent with your funds treated as theirs.But yes we should always appreciate members like @Ratimov who creates such threads to help members spread awareness among them and not your keys not your coins is term on which they need to think up.

The truth is that it's not easy to be your own bank. I'd even say that many are not ready for it. We've long been used to delegating enormous tasks of securing our finances to the banks. The advent of banks actually made us complacent and comfortable because we trust them. At the same time it also made us uncomfortable when we are in the possession of huge amounts of money because of fear or that we admit that we aren't capable of sufficiently protecting them.

But with the banks abusing their roles in society came Bitcoin. We desire to be independent. We desire to truly own and control what we have. Here is the golden opportunity. But it also demands a lot from us. We all need to step up. Admittedly, sometimes I get paranoid.

One of good non custodial wallets to use is Electrum wallet. Two topics to help using Electrum wallet responsibly.

How to Safely Download and Verify Electrum
The paranoid user's security guide for using Electrum safely.

Very timely, I've just made a thread[1] about the recent news of another company that has filed for Chapter 11 and they've lost(as said) the money of their customers.
[1] Prime Trust's bankruptcy due to forgotten seed/private key

The best antivirus is yourself. That's true about clicking links so that the best starts from yourself knowing what you're clicking, what websites you are downloading and what applications and software you download. Because if you're familiar with your browsing activity, there's no amount of anti virus can par with that. On the other hand, even if you've got the best antivirus and you have the latest update but if your browsing activity isn't as safe as what individuals do, that's a useless thing to have so discipline. still.

True that, there is always a new variant of malware that is not yet detected by any anti-virus program.  Remember virus and malwares are the first ones to evolve, and these anti-malware and anti-virus programs are created after these viruses and malwares have infected someone's unit.

So we should always be alert and avoid any suspicious links and downloads that may be modified and equipped with these new viruses and malwares.  I agree that the higher our aim for security and control the greater the needs to be hands-on and get updated thus the responsibility of maintaining the updates is greatly increased.
 

Nobody can tell if you've made an excellent decision by investing in Bitcoin, because even Satoshi doesn't know the future of Bitcoin. But I don't think the vision of Satoshi was to consider Bitcoin as an investment like a kind of digital gold. I think his vision was to propose a new mean of payment, so he certainly wanted Bitcoin to be used rather than just being hodl.

My The only thing I regret doing is not knowing about bitcoin on time and investing.
My future plan was to invest in gold or stocks when I am able to gather the money, but Satoshi changed that for me.
It was after I started investing in bitcoins that I recognized the need to also want to keep it safe. I thank the forum for that exposure because if the importance of security had not been stressed her, I would not have taken it seriously.

I was reading some topics after this post and you know what I have found a great example to elaborate more on how important and meaningful your post is OP: Prime Trust's bankruptcy due to forgotten seed/private key. This thread says some companies lost millions of users' assets just because they lost track of their seed phrase or recovery key. I mean what better could be a better example than this to understand how important it becomes to secure your assets on your own? No doubt this might be an exit plan from that company but to emphasize the importance we can assume if we do not take full care and will not follow the norms that we should follow then what outcomes we might have to see?

Giving your assets to companies like these is wrong in the first place as you will own the coin only when you will own the key if you lose the key then you also lost the funds too. So keep track of your key and seed phrase and try to increase security by 2FA too.

They were holding these assets in a Hardware wallet and lost the recovery key Well if they have a ledger then they might recover it otherwise they can not.

Solid thread @OP. Putting security in the users is one of the responsibilities that decentralization affords us and it is available by design. This way, no repudiation or pointing of fingers if something goes wrong with a user's account. The importance of security in this space cannot be overemphasised and this thread does a good job along with other resources mentioned does a fine job at driving that point home.

Good job! Anyone who is new to the space should give this a read.

Hmm, I think he recently did a bump to this great idea, I was going through the list and found a lot of new topics which I think I need to take a look at. At the same time realized I also had some decent topics to be shared there, so thanks for a good reminder. But before sharing my topic I had to suffer from the image readjustment as most of the links are expired.

For the rest, I do remember that a few days a junior here was asking about the best way to learn from this forum and I recommended he ask for useful topics from your local seniors seems like now he doesn't need to ask anyone if he really wants to learn. For the different slogans on the user's responsibilities with the funds, I think that should be from the initial learnings from a user to stay safe in this market space.

Don't put so much trust in antivirus programmes, no matter how updated they might appear to be. As it has been said several times now on this forum, hackers have advanced their malware to the point where it is now undetected by the most active antivirus , which means they will just be keeping track of whatever data their target is on. So one should be in control of its security, as relying too much on something can sometimes make us victims of what we least expect.
 
It will just be of great interest if one can handle whatever device they make use of that is connected to their important data, like their financial records, wallet connections, card details, and private information. All of that shouldn't be used to browse the internet often, as you can click on the wrong link when you least expect it. Google Ads is now one hell of a mess, especially for those who don't make use of an ad blocker.
 
Although having antivirus on your system must increase the chances of detecting some of the cheap malware and phishing links, these can then be avoided.

You are so right about this thing. I have also experienced the fear of thoughts that I am the only person who is control of my assets like in term of death I sometimes think what will happen if I die and the assets I have will be abandoned as there is no one in family or friends who have access to my wallets and giving them the access also makes me vulnerable. I am not saying I do not trust my family and friends instead even if I gave them the access then it can be compromised from there side too even if I took care of all measures.

At the end, we have to admit that we are responsible for our assets and we do have to be aware of all kinds of attacks either they are ransomware attacks or phishing attacks or anything else. The knowledge is necessary to remain secure in the network. Even if we are using open source platform, we still need to be sure before using them or importing our wallets on them because phishing scams are not top not.

Thanks for sharing such useful links to read. As I was not aware of all of them and this compendium is like ocean of knowledge. I might get answers to lot of queries here.

Dear OP I have been here for almost 3 years, and I am this old to know about this encyclopaedia thread, which is just full of all kinds of useful links that, if I started reading, I would for sure ecome a  pro, but of course not in one day. But still, I do not have words to express my thanks.

This will be of great help in the future, and I will try to read these threads. I will also try my best to include some useful topics in the lists if Ratimov will accept them, but of course those will be unique compared to the ones in the encyclopedia.

And I totally agreed with your point that with full power comes more responsibility, and that statement suits us best because when I came to know about decentralised systems, I also lost some money due to the wrong selection of blockchain networks, and I realised that now I cannot do anything but be careful next time.

Then I also realized that I am the one who is fully responsible for this mess, and I will be punished alone; I cannot blame anyone else. This feeling of realizing mistakes makes one more independent, and this feeling is also very awesome at the same time, even though I have lost funds. The point is that you passed the bank's management systems and avoided handing over your funds to them so that they would manage them for you; instead, you took the responsibility into your own hands. But it is not like we have to develop our own wallets, write codes, or spend a hell of a lot of money too. Instead, we just need a little knowledge of the things we are preparing to do, and boom, we will be OK to go.

If we had ever seen the kind of security measures taken in control of the financial vault, we will understand the reason why we should tightly secure our asset from any invaders from reaping the labour of our asset into their own disposal on a thin air, only if we could also know why securities are employed to safeguard a property or any physical asset then we wouldn't mind if handling of our financial asset would cost us, we can go at any length to secure them because the cost to that is very little to the lost that may set in if we are unable to take enough security measures.

We have heard the maxim that "with great power comes great responsibility." I can also say that in the bitcoin and cryptocurrency ecosystem, that with great control and security features comes greater responsibilities. We didn't ask for Satoshi Nakamoto to create bitcoin but we've bought into his vision and principles of decentralization and control of our own money. We are tired of the traditional banking and want to be our own banks.

We often emphasize, "Not Your Keys, Not Your Coins." We advise crypto newcomers to "Take your coins off exchanges." We counsel those in the community who care to listen to use a non-custodial wallet. We stress the importance of keeping your recovery phrase safe. Even prominent figures like Fillippone have written extensively on "Securing Your Seed Phrase with Washers." We advocate for having the latest antivirus software and being cautious about clicking on links. Why? Because with greater control and security features come greater responsibilities.


You have made an excellent decision to invest in bitcoin. You embraced Satoshi's vision and may even have you own sub vision. Congratulations , but it doesn't stop there. Your forever task is to develop a heightened level of vigilance and responsibility to ensure the safe and responsible management of these digital assets to avoid losing them. That is why I say, with greater control and security features comes greater responsibilities.


If you want to take greater responsibility for your digital assets and don't know where to start, Ratimov has created the Beginners & Help Encyclopedia and it is updated yearly. It is a compendium of various useful articles. There you will find articles, links on security, privacy, scams. It will bring you so much value. Check it out.