Dark (New) on Nostr: Don’t trust your stack to a hot wallet. Just get it off the exchange to an ...
Don’t trust your stack to a hot wallet. Just get it off the exchange to an air-gapped cold storage solution. IMO if budget for signing hardware is a consideration, you can’t beat the simplicity of a couple sets of cloned Cold Card MK4’s to spread your stack, and over time, a couple of other simple, cloned, non battery dependent signing devices for hardware diversity and further spreading of your stack. And another set that never gets anything sent to it from a KYC source. Those new fancy units like the Q and the Prime that cost a quarter of what a cell phone costs and have a batteries with finite service lives are vulnerabilities as far as I’m concerned. And expensive to maintain clones of.
Ideally you want to be able to crush or burn one entire set of devices and still have a fully functional set locked up offsite that are a pain in the ass to get to under duress, that you can use to sign transactions without waiting for replacement hardware to get shipped to you in the event of a device failure or worse. And tamper-evident steel backups for each set, in other locations, that you can occasionally inspect. Having a geologically separated non KYC set or a distributed multi-sig that you can sweep UTXO’s to temporarily in an emergency isn’t a bad idea either. I once swept my whole stack to a hot wallet with an RBF transaction to beat a hacker to the punch on-chain and buy me some time to re-evaluate my security model when they tried draining my piece of crap Ledger Nano X set that had battery issues from day 1. To be fair, the hack wasn’t Ledger’s fault. I was a noob and got tricked into using a piece of watch-only software that didn’t get vetted by Apple before they added it to the App Store.
Always use open source checksum verifiable software on a largely offline PC for wallet/account/UTXO management. And have it talking to your own node. Having a second encrypted installation of the software that’s carryable or offsite somewhere isn’t a bad to have too. If your whole world falls apart you want to be able to make three stops before the airport and use your first sats where you land to buy a toothbrush, a pair of shorts and some sunscreen lol.
As far as places to buy, non KYC services are great to be versed in, but I think Bitcoin Well’s direct-to-self-custody model is really well designed. Just make sure you have secure, redundant watch-only software access to your stacks and that you are consolidating UTXO’s when fees are low.
Between node hardware, PC hardware, signing devices, seed backup solutions, partially custodial multi-sig succession services, and firearms, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have 10% of your BTC budget dedicated to security and self-sovereignty. This is an expense that government revenue pricks aren’t accounting for when they are looking solely at your portfolio performance.
Ideally you want to be able to crush or burn one entire set of devices and still have a fully functional set locked up offsite that are a pain in the ass to get to under duress, that you can use to sign transactions without waiting for replacement hardware to get shipped to you in the event of a device failure or worse. And tamper-evident steel backups for each set, in other locations, that you can occasionally inspect. Having a geologically separated non KYC set or a distributed multi-sig that you can sweep UTXO’s to temporarily in an emergency isn’t a bad idea either. I once swept my whole stack to a hot wallet with an RBF transaction to beat a hacker to the punch on-chain and buy me some time to re-evaluate my security model when they tried draining my piece of crap Ledger Nano X set that had battery issues from day 1. To be fair, the hack wasn’t Ledger’s fault. I was a noob and got tricked into using a piece of watch-only software that didn’t get vetted by Apple before they added it to the App Store.
Always use open source checksum verifiable software on a largely offline PC for wallet/account/UTXO management. And have it talking to your own node. Having a second encrypted installation of the software that’s carryable or offsite somewhere isn’t a bad to have too. If your whole world falls apart you want to be able to make three stops before the airport and use your first sats where you land to buy a toothbrush, a pair of shorts and some sunscreen lol.
As far as places to buy, non KYC services are great to be versed in, but I think Bitcoin Well’s direct-to-self-custody model is really well designed. Just make sure you have secure, redundant watch-only software access to your stacks and that you are consolidating UTXO’s when fees are low.
Between node hardware, PC hardware, signing devices, seed backup solutions, partially custodial multi-sig succession services, and firearms, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to have 10% of your BTC budget dedicated to security and self-sovereignty. This is an expense that government revenue pricks aren’t accounting for when they are looking solely at your portfolio performance.