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Comment by napsterbr | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t bothered transferring out my BTC to my own wallet because 1) it’s a tiny amount and 2) the chance of me screwing up and losing the coins was greater than my exchange blowing up. Apparently, the latter point no longer holds true, so I‘ve changed my mind and decided on taking ownership of my coins.

Anybody got a nice, fool-proof tutorial/guide I can use to safely generate and manage my own wallet? I’m also open to any additional suggestions/recommendations you may have on how to do that transition.

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Metamask and Brave wallets are free, popular and very easy to set up. They're considered hot wallets and not as secure as a hardware cold wallet like Ledger, but you'd have to wait for shipping and it isn't free.

On screwing anything up: always send a test transaction first, and don't blindly copy paste - always verify the address manually.

https://brave.com/wallet/

https://metamask.io/

If you don't hold enough that getting a hardware wallet is justified, get one of the more popular offline wallets for your coin, create a wallet (with addresses) and withdraw from exchange to the address. Keep your seed phrase safe, eg. written down and locked in a safe, password manager or encrypted file on USB/cloud storage. Again this is for amounts low enough it's not worth hardware wallet but imo it's safe enough

For my small amounts of crypto I just use MetaMask. My keys are written on a laminated piece of paper and put in a safe.

If it's at least $1000, buy a Trezor:

https://trezor.io/

It's easier to use than Ledger, has a better history with privacy and the knowledge you get from using it will be good for you in the future.

Under $1000 I use Bluewallet on my phone, the most important is to not click on a scammy ad instead of a real wallet (look at the number of downloads to make sure you don't get scammed).

If it's a small amount why not just sell it and buy it back in the future

It might double or triple or worse.

Or halve or a third. Have you not been reading about FTX and Binance?

If it's a small amount, it doesn't really matter even if it goes to 0. But it matters a lot if it triples or more.

Probably best to buy a hardware wallet if you want ongoing support for accessing these in the future: https://www.ledger.com/

I have mixed feelings with Ledger. On the one hand they have a lot of features and are very user friendly but on the other side their software (firmware) is quite buggy/unreliable. Additionally they leaked the home addresses of their customers some time ago…

If the amount of coins is not material I would go with coinbase wallet (non-custodial) if you have an iPhone. If the amount is bigger and it is bitcoin only I would go with the coldcard wallet

No, you should stay very far away from them.

Besides their products being entirely closed-source, they also managed to leak very detailed customer data (that they weren't even supposed to keep) not once but twice. This lead to several cases of sophisticated and very persistent identity theft, robberies, and even home invasions, which Ledger did not even apologise for in any meaningful way.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/ledger-data-leak-a-simple-mis...

https://www.coindesk.com/business/2020/12/23/from-sim-swaps-...

I dont understand "technical" people buying these sort of things... a crypto "wallet" is just a private/public keypair.

Just store your keys I a Keepass file and make multiple copies of it. And maybe maintain a printed copy of your keys.

How does the latter point no longer hold true?

It will be interesting to see all of the desperate pleas for help and news stories in the coming months and years of a good chunk of these people who’ve moved crypto off exchanges having their own wallets hacked, losing their seed phrases, etc.

To be clear I don’t wish for any of these things to happen but as people our nature is to mess up, lose things, forget stuff, etc. I don’t think many of these people fully realize there’s no “reset password” button or toll free number to call if things go sideways.

The second point is a comparison about which is more probable. If the risk of an exchange goes up (it becomes more probable), at some point it passes the risk threshold of losing control of the BTC in your own wallet.

Exchanges have imploded, been hacked, been subject to exit scams, etc since Mt Gox.

People just forget and there’s been enough newbies in the space this run they don’t know.

That said I agree with you it’s tipped further but the vast majority of people playing with crypto don’t stand a chance of securing and maintaining their own wallet. Having a non-custodial wallet also defeats the purpose of crypto for most people - their only use is trading on an exchange.

Tipped? You need to update your model with what has happened in the last few months, it’s not a random exchange exploding every few years anymore. Yes there are risks securing a piece of paper, but don’t fall for the perfect solution fallacy, the alternative of keeping all their crypto on exchanges is simply irresponsible. Newbies this run that only signed and used exchanges like betting websites and don’t want to learn more then simply must get out, there is no alternative to owning your keys.

Bank of America has 67 million customers. Should we try to venture a guess at how many password resets they do daily? It almost certainly has to be in the tens if not hundreds of thousands. People that temporarily lose access to their bank account are not going to magically change their nature because of the word “crypto”.

The average person who got into crypto because they saw a Larry David commercial will almost certainly lose access to their wallet at some point on a long enough timeline. Except this time, with crypto, it’s permanent and the only thing that will happen is people online will tell you it’s a good thing you hopefully learned your lesson.

And, again, not being able to trade completely defeats the purpose of having anything to do with the space for almost all of these users in the first place.

Numbers matter here. If "all their crypto" is $500 worth, and represents a small portion of their wealth, and they're actively trading it, going out to a wallet isn't really that sensible. But yes, if they're sitting on thousands, your comment stands. The relative language though does feel like it just adds to the confusion of folks trying to figure out the space.

I don’t believe the marketing of hardware wallets, I held comfortably for nearly ten years with piece of papers, and even in my password manager for small sums. The probability of burglary x they find the paper x they know what it is order of magnitudes less than an entity you give them online disappearing with them. A seed is just a few words, no recourse if you lose them but not that complicated either.

A middle ground may be to push them to coinbase; at least if they go tits up you know crypto is basically over.

It‘s not over, thats when the fun begins! Maybe it actually already begins slightly before, when Tether collapses and pulls the whole Eurodollar system into the abyss.

Not to be confused with Coinbase Wallet which is an independent wallet like MetaMask

I've used Jaxx (now Jaxx Liberty) for many years for a local (Mac) wallet. Many coins, no maintenance issues so far.

https://www.jaxx.io/downloads

Buy hardware wallet, make sure to buy from the source, not third party, not Amazon. It could be tinkered.

Use open source offsite wallet.

Use steel/titanium plates.

And here is the controversial part: use 1password, you can use it as is or combine it with your own method.

I either use https://www.bitaddress.org/ Or Electrum on a Tails LiveCD.

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