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by UncleMeat 1956 days ago
> Nobody can steal your bitcoin if your private keys are well protected. And of course, the best protection is a brain wallet.

The end result of this is that a huge portion of humans cannot safely store their wealth in btc. I sure as hell don't trust myself to keep that much cash in a brain wallet.

"If your private keys are well protected" might as well mean "if you can do four backflips in a row" to most people.
1 comments
sparkie 1956 days ago
The best strategy is to use a BIP-39 seed phrase with an additional passphrase. The seed phrase should be written down/etched into a piece of metal and stored safely (with redundancy), and the passphrase should be memorized by yourself and possibly a family member (as insurance if something happens to you).

You can leave a small amount of coins in the wallet using the same seed phrase but with no passphrase as a decoy. This way, if somebody "stumbles upon" your seed phrase, they'll attempt to recover this small amount of money, and you can monitor using only the xpub to discover it has been compromised. You then have some time to move the other coins before anybody could potentially brute-force your passphrase (Since they need to compute PBKDF2 for each attempt).

You can reuse the same seed phrase for multiple wallets, using a different passphrase for each. There is no way for somebody to determine if you have surrendered all passphrases for a give seed, since there could be infinitely many. This offers plausible deniability in the case your thief is the government.

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UncleMeat 1956 days ago
Listen to yourself. Decoys? What percentage of people do you think won't go running away screaming when you tell them that this is how they should store their wealth? If I lose my bank password I can walk into a branch and talk to a human. No need for metal etchings and incantations.
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sparkie 1956 days ago
Yeah, not everyone needs custody of their own money.

But those of us who do, can.

Under fiat, we can't.

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UncleMeat 1955 days ago
And that'd be fine if btc was a niche product for a few people who want this control but it also comes with extreme social costs in terms of emissions. The power use argument that advocates make is that it'll be fine once btc is used by literally everybody.
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