It is often said that "not your keys, not your coins" but as many people have unfortunately discovered, sometimes it is also "your keys, still not your coins". This is due to common mistakes made while doing self-custody such as not keeping backups or storing seed phrases in insecure ways.

Having done this and worked in IT security for years, I would like to share some tips for making sure your self-custody is done safely:

• Split your holdings into "hot" and "cold" wallets which are stored offline. Hot wallets are your everyday spending wallets whereas cold wallets are stored offline. You want the majority of your coins in cold wallets. It's fine to store a small amount of spending money on your PC or phone just like you would have cash in a wallet, but don't store $10,000 worth of BTC on your phone and then get on the subway with it.
• Make sure you keep at least one backup of your seed phrase. The 3-2-1 strategy is a great way to think of backups. You need three total copies at all time, two of which are stored on different types of storage media, and one of which is stored off-site. This will protect you against both accidental data loss due to hardware failure and localized disasters like flood, fire, etc.
• Keep your seed phrase and its copies as offline as possible. If you store them on the same computer you browse the web with, you have a large "attack surface" which greatly increases the chance they will get stolen.
• Consider multi-sig wallets. Multi-sig accounts require signatures from multiple wallets to make transactions. You can choose other parties you trust like family members to hold the other wallets. The benefit of multi-sig over Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme and other methods is that it doesn't require all of the keys to be in the same place at the same time. The downside is that it requires trust in and cooperation from other parties, and many crypto users don't know other crypto users they can trust.

Ok you say, but if I make a backup, how can I trust my off-site or local backup provider? Are you saying I should put my seed phrase in a safe deposit box or dropbox and call it a day?

Absolutely not. That would be very dangerous. And so would "splitting up" your words and storing them in different locations. Somebody able to get enough words may be able to guess the rest. You should never store your plaintext seed phrase on any cloud provider or cloud-based password manager.

There are two solutions to the problem of needing to store seed phrases with parties you can't trust 1000% or in environments you cannot fully control:

• You can first encrypt the seed phrases using an open-source battle-tested software like Veracrypt. This way, somebody who gets a copy of your encrypted seed phrase can't open that encrypted vault without the password. You could store the vault anywhere. A veracrypt container works just like a folder. You can drag and drop a file into it and that file is now encrypted. You can have the entire container stored as a single file you can easily copy to other locations.
• You can split up your seed phrase with something like Shamir's Secret Sharing Scheme. With SSSS you can take any secret like a seed phrase, split it up into parts (which look like random text), and give those parts to any party. The parts don't do anything on their own, you need a sufficient number of these parts (called the threshold) to recombine and make the full secret. You can choose this threshold and make it 2 of 3, 3 of 100, whatever you'd like. Crucially, having some parts or threshold - 1 part doesn't get you any closer to the seed phrase than no parts.

BTC is currently trading well below the stock-to-flow value. Does the model still have utility? What are your thoughts?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/5626873

This is a day created to make representatives more aware that their constituents care about crypto and want to assert their freedom to use it. Pro-crypto lobbying group is asking people to ask their reps to support the The Financial Innovation and Technology for the 21st Century Act which pretty much everybody in crypto agrees is a good bill for removing legislative ambiguity around crypto.

The Internet Computer (ICP) is a groundbreaking cryptocurrency project that aims to reshape the future of the internet by introducing a decentralized computing platform. Launched by the DFINITY Foundation, ICP has garnered significant attention for its ambitious goal of enabling the creation of decentralized web services and applications that run directly on the blockchain. In this article, we will explore the origins, key features, use cases, and the potential impact of the Internet Computer in the world of blockchain and decentralized technology.

In the ever-evolving world of cryptocurrencies, Stellar (XLM) stands out as a blockchain platform with a mission: to facilitate fast, low-cost cross-border payments and make financial services accessible to everyone, regardless of location or economic status. Founded in 2014 by Jed McCaleb and Joyce Kim, Stellar has gained recognition for its focus on financial inclusion and its unique consensus mechanism. This article explores the key features, use cases, and potential impact of Stellar in the cryptocurrency and financial industries.

Hi Guys,

What would you recommend as a alternative to ledger? Hardware or software.

Thx

I wish more people knew about Bitcoin's connection to the bank bailouts. Bitcoin unfortunately does not have the best brand ambassadors. This week is a great opportunity to tell your friends about it, because it matters.

The 2008 bank bailouts were a major motivator behind the creation of Bitcoin. The first block ever mined even contains a reference to it: The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. During the bank bailouts, the government just printed a bunch of money and gave it to the banks, around 700 billion USD. They did this because it was politically expedient, well really because they had to or the whole damned system would collapse. And the 99% ended up paying for the mistakes of the 1%. All of us were made to pay for the mistakes of a very small, incredibly powerful and wealthy segment of society who made reckless investment decisions. People lost their homes, their jobs, their livelyhoods, their savings, and yet not a single one of those bankers went to jail. Instead, they took the bailout money and gave themselves extravagant bonuses. Yet the problem is not new, throughout history, every nation that has ever failed, has had their currency end in hyperinflation. The temptation to print money is too strong. Perhaps it is something that should not be entrusted to politicians or even humans at all.

Satoshi, in his wisdom, created a system by which no new money could ever be printed. No corruptible, tempted authority could use it to turn on the money printer and rob entire generations of their wealth or force them to pay for wars they did not support. He made a currency which cannot be corrupted and cannot be hacked, with 99.9% uptime, with instant transfers across borders. It is neutral technology open to anybody with a phone or a computer and access to the internet. Which is much less than you need to open a bank account. Bitcoin doesn't care about your credit history, or whether or not you can provide a reliable mailing address. Bitcoin doesn't close on weekends and will never charge you exorbitant fees to use your own money. You never have to wait days for a payment to clear. Bitcoin puts you in charge of your money and nobody else. And it makes sure nobody can print away its value.

But then a bunch of people came along selling get-rich-quick schemes based on crypto technology, and everybody goes "crypto bad". Satoshi gave a gift to the world. He didn't stick around to get rich off it, he didn't use it for celebrity, he just made Bitcoin and disappeared. Thank you Satoshi for your gift to the world.

FindTheMag is a powerful tool which helps you find the most profitable BOINC projects to mine/crunch. It is open source and runs on Linux/MacOS/Windows. FTM can also directly control your BOINC [email protected] client, giving you more control over the crunching process than BOINC typically gives you.

Context: Gridcoin [email protected] is a CPU and GPU-mineable cryptocurrency which has you process data for scientific research projects instead of calculating hashes. Finding the most profitable BOINC project can be tricky because every BOINC project awards credit differently, all hardware achieve different levels of efficiency on each project, and you must calculate the credit:magnitude ratio for any given project. Gridcoin is the most ASIC-resistant coin in existence.

This new release comes with a number of enhancements and all existing users are encouraged to upgrade.

Changes:

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• Table printed to user is now more useful and you can customize various aspects of it

ETH at $1500 and BTC under $25k? Doubled my DCA this week.

cross-posted from: https://monero.town/post/432104

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