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Comment by this_user | Hacker News Reader

And then you are still losing your money, because your supposedly secure hardware wallet had a backdoor all along. Or you are downloading a wallet app that is compromised. Or you are making any one of a million possible mistakes that can lose your everything you have in crypto.

At the end of the day, you need to keep your keys on an a dedicated air-gapped system where you have epoxied the USB ports and have ideally written the OS and all of the firmware (and the compiler) yourself. But then what's the point of a supposed currency of the future that is barely usable without paranoid security measures?

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Bitcoin is a crypto nerd’s impractical fantasy of currency that became the ultimate speculative asset ever although it failed dramatically at being an actual currency. It’s traded almost exclusively on gray market exchanges right now, but this and the SEC Coinbase case are the government shifting it to regulated KYC exchanges. They will probably inevitably win, at least in dollar denominated trade

Yeah, at least the failure modes if you keep your money in specie are obvious

I'm fine with taking on that risk. I encrypt my laptop's hard drive and my backups. If I forget those passwords all my data is gone forever too. I'm willing to take that risk with my data and my money. If you aren't willing to take that risk, crypto might not be for you.

(These are the hard truths they won't tell you in the super bowl commercials)

What if your house burns down with your laptop on it?

I would restore from an off-site backup.

> If you sent your money to a company like Voyager, instead of controlling your keys yourself, you missed the point.

so eschewing exchanges, you conduct all your commercial transactions directly in crypto straight from your crypto wallets? it's cool you can avoid all fiat like that, but doesn't it limit your purchasing options? Or have I missed another one of the points of crypto?

Most of my commercial transactions are still in fiat. I do use crypto when I can, and yes it's done straight from a local wallet. I use an android app called Cake Wallet and the private key stays locally on the device. I keep as much on my phone as I would paper cash in a leather wallet, under $100. The rest is on a hardware wallet.

I use an exchange occasionally, but I don't keep money parked there long-term like a bank. Deposit fiat, trade for crypto, withdraw crypto. I'm never exposed for more than an hour.

Is a gigantic safe and armed guards considered paranoid security measures?

If you have one personally, yes

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