Bud
· 1w
I think cold storage is possible, but now, how do you pick one now that the most impressive blew up in flames? I just can’t. Multisig setups rely on multiple hardware wallets, so I’m not doing t...
I totally get this. My way of thinking is that the mistake we made was all assuming that CC was the “most secure” and “the most impressive” - there was a tremendous marketing and social proof campaign behind this, which made be somewhat wary of the product. The nails in the coffins for me though were the poor UX and them moving away from open source. I point these things out not to scold anyone who used CC but to acknowledge that they were always there.
My feeling is that any person with sufficient bitcoin in self custody should 1) use a passphrase and 2) strongly consider spreading their stack across keys generated by at least two different devices.
To me this the akin to the logic of dice rolling ie “people will store their life saving in Bitcoin but don’t was to spending 30 minutes rolling dice…” similarly “people will store their life saving in Bitcoin but down want to spend a few hundred dollars (where a few hundred dollars is ultimately trivial to the person / size of the stack) to have key exposure across several devices.” So my view is that again, folks with stacks that are material to them should strongly consider doing one or both of these things. Additionally, get a stamping kit, back up keys on metal.
The ETF’s 20 layers of security can become 20 layers of gatekeeping, obfuscation, and or litigation in any circumstance where they have overwhelming incentive to separate you from you Bitcoin or other brokerage assets.
That said, I believe bitcoin is choose your own adventure. Not perfect solutions, only trade offs. You can do all of these things. Self custody with keys generated with dice and/or across multiple devices + Bitcoin in Multisig + Bitcoin sitting on Brokerage/Exchange + ETF Bitcoin + MSTR/STRC. No one can judge you this and it’s ultimately none of their business.
Finally, in terms of options for self custody. I believe Foundation, Blockstream, and Bitkey are all high quality devices. They are also open source products - and while open source doesn’t guarantee that there are no issues, it raises the likelihood that any issues will be found out in the open and socialized rapidly across the Bitcoin human network (rather than hidden and denied by the company or logged in a zero-day database for “later use”).
