So yesterday HCP replied to something I had posted with this:
So, as I said above I know what *I* am getting myself into and the risks of each. We should be helping others learn that too.
This is probably one of the best attitudes I have seen on this forum in a long time... To often, in too many parts of this forum, people dig their heels in and start arguing about fairly irrelevant stuff. I've even probably been guilty of this on some occasions!
It's a bit like ProgrammingLanguageA vs. ProgrammingLanguageB... there isn't a "one size fits all" approach to this stuff. For some people... blockchain.com or Exodus or Coinomi or Coinbase or Binance wallets make the
best fit...
For others, nothing short of a paper wallet crafted using dice and a 486 laptop running a Linux live OS in a Faraday cage will suffice... and then everything else in between.
The first step, is to identify what your needs/goals and use cases are and then find the solution that best matches those, while making sure that you understand the risks of your chosen solution and how to mitigate them. Even hardware wallets and paper wallets can be "useless" if you do something dumb like
putting your seed words or private keys in an email draft folder protected by SIM based 2FA I think people should spend more time "playing" on TestNet... get a feel for how things work, experiment and learn... play with paper wallets... try manually creating transactions and learn how it all works. Personally, I think it's fun and you're not going to lose anything of value except a little bit of your time.
And I do think we need a separate thread here to discuss it. So here it is the separate thread.
As a rule he is correct in that we as a group do tend to dig in when we feel our position is threatened and our favorite wallet is under attack or a wallet that we think is evil is being recommended without ever getting a full picture of what the person who is asking
really needs or has the ability to do.
Hardware wallets are great, and you know what I use them. Now I'm going to pick on my accountant. He is older, his eyesight is going, and has arthritis. Hardware wallets are just about useless for him. The screens are too small, he cant easily get the microUSB plug into them and outside of one or 2 of them he cant put in the pin. But, if he asks we are going to tell him use a hardware wallet. When he says he can't we as a group dig in and explain to him why he must. However, he will never admit on a public forum that he just can't do it. We all know people like that, for whatever reason they will never show weakness [Even if it's to a bunch of people who they will never meet, on an anonymous forum]
You know what, for him we should probably put our heads together and come up with solutions, possibly multiple ones to solve his problem. Yeah, it's going to be a pain but staring a reply with "You really really really should use a hardware wallet, but if you can't then....." is better then "Fine, if you don't want to be secure then install electrum but it's not as secure." Because people see the "not as secure" and start to wonder. Because we could have said "You will loose some security having funds not secured by a hardware wallet, but electrum will do this thing called multisig let me show you how it works. This was even if your PC gets hacked so long as your laptop is still secure then your funds are safe. And, you can have some small funds on a 2nd electrum wallet on your PC that if it get's hacked no big deal."
I know I have not, up until recently I was in the "what are you being such an ass about, just use a hardware wallet"
I saw it again with people slamming the bitpay wallet and BIP70. Like it / don't like it does not matter. If we didn't stop to find out that all this person is doing is paying merchants that are only generating BIP70 invoices then getting into the argument of BIP70 evil, BitPay evil, really does not help people. Pointing out that BIP70 is going away from core and might not be supported long term is fine, but telling people not to use it or directing someone who might not be that tech savvy to one of the invoice decoders is just wasting time and generating frustration. Giving them the pros and cons of the bitpay wallet vs electrum vs Mycelium is what we should be doing.
Thus ends my rant for today.
-Dave