Days Since a Cryptocurrency Exchange Has Lost More Than $100M | Hacker News Reader

Days Since a Cryptocurrency Exchange Has Lost More Than $100M

dayssinceacryptocurrencyexchangehaslostmorethan100million.com

25 pointskick19 comments

I would not call the Bitfinex issues "losing more than 100m". AFAIK this wasn't an issue of money being lost.

So kinda seems like they are cooking the books here.

that is quite the url!!

Keeping digital assets in exchanges, long term, seems unwise. There's cold storage options.

I researched the state of the art of self-custody cold storage and it seems both complex and fraught with places where workflow accidents could lose a wallet.

The safest most reasonable thing I could find was Smart Custody but phew there are a lot of moving parts: https://github.com/BlockchainCommons/SmartCustodyWhitePapers...

What is your recommended cold storage option?

A Ledger/Trezor.

What happens if the device breaks or the place it is stored is destroyed?

You can create multiple backup paper copies, and also 2-of-3 or 2-of-4 multisig helps you in the second case. You can also have multisig between different devices.

Is there any automation or tooling to help you do inventory management on devices and integrity checking on wallets?

Can you be more specific?

You can check the recovery seed that you are creating (what you write on the paper).

Trezor's software and hardware is open source, so you can check any part of it.

There are different things you can do to prepare for different failure scenarios, though not everything is automated, it's better to test some things by hand.

Essentially, I am looking for a guide I could hand to someone who is moderately technical that would describe:

1. Failure scenarios a scheme can/can't protect against

2. How to setup the system for that scenario

3. Recommendation on how often to confirm system and backups

3a. How to recover from failed hardware

4. Recommendations on lifetime of system until replacement

4a. Recommendation on recovery if system is compromised (physical theft)

Essentially where is the best practices guide?

https://wiki.trezor.io/User_manual-Security_best_practices

This is the best Trezor has, it's quite limited though, but good for koderately technical user.

For storing large amount of money you can hire experts.

Better to lose your digital asset due to your own incompetence than to a hacker of an exchange. Taking the money out of exchanges makes them less appealing targets, too.

Exchanges on one end and cold storage in the other are not the only options.

A wallet in the mobile phone and backups in a couple trusted computers seems reasonable for me.

$100 Million what?

Yen? AUD? BTC? USD? (probably... but the irony is thick here)

The $ implies it

$ is used as a symbol for dozens of currencies.

Obviously 2008 Zimbabwean dollar.

The URL doesn't have it.

Had you limited your choices to USD / CAD / AUD / HKD (or others in that vein), you may have been making a semi valid point. JPY and BTC are not $ denominated.

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