This is in response to an article declaring bitcoin dead because Coinbase and Binance closed down several accounts linked to Russia, and because of FUD around the DC regime's executive order on Crypto this week. The article encouraged people to invest in gold, land, and food. Though this is good advice during these uncertain times, its irrelevant to the future of bitcoin. The claim is that Bitcoin is part of 'the grid' because it requires electricity and internet, and the price is subject to manipulation by the media, government, and wallstreet, is both true and false. To send your bitcoin to someone else, you will need some internet and electricity; but to own it, not so much.

I won't bore you with history lessons of the past when bitcoin was banned, declared illegal, exchanges hacked, wallets stolen, and on and on and on. Today isn't even included in the 445 times bitcoin has been declared dead. What I want to focus on here is how you can care for your bitcoin and how to properly own it without relying on "the grid".

Rule number one: Do not leave your bitcoin in a noncustodial wallet. Noncustodial means you are relying on someone or something that you do not control to store your wallet secret. In the bitcoin world you'll hear it said "Not your keys, not your coin." Trezor describes the custodial wallet problem here. Even coinbase encourages self-custody

Rule number two: Keep your mouth shut, and your nose clean. Do your best to not disclose your bitcoin balance to the public. Don't punch your wallet address into a public website to check your balance. There are many measures to keep your property a secret, one being running a private electrum server discussed below.

I don't believe in hardware wallets as they can be a single point of failure. They are a very good way to store your wallet securely, but how many extras do you want to keep around in case you need access to your funds after you find out the one you are using was lying in water at the bottom of your safe for six months?

If you have an old computer (or phone) that you are willing to never connect to the internet after you install a bitcoin wallet, this provides the same function as a hardware wallet and it doesn't cost you anything. If it fails you can just get another PC and install the necessary software.

The misnomer most people believe is that a crypto wallet is software or hardware. This is only partially true.

The purpose of software that is called a "wallet" is to perform several functions. These are mostly:

1. To generate an asymmetric encryption key pair (a private and a matching public key) in a secure manner. This string of words or bits is the actual "wallet". (There is a more complex reality here that's not important early in the learning process)

2. To create, sign and submit transactions to be included in the blockchain. This is for moving a balance out of your wallet, which is represented by your "wallet address" (public key).

3. To report to you the status, balance and history of your wallet by reading the blockchain (either by downloading the entire 500GB blockchain, or by accessing an electrum server)

The wallet, simply put, is actually a secret number that you write down somewhere in a secure manner. It requires no electricity or internet for you to own the funds, rather some chicken-scratch you put on a piece of paper that only you have access to.

Whatever computer you put that number into (with your secret recovery phrase) is now a liability, and you need to keep that computer adequately secured unless you securely wipe its storage.

There are ways of "splitting the secret" across physical locations and across several secret recovery phrases with something called a "multi-signature wallet". This is described here

As far as wallets go, there are different ones for different purposes. If you're looking for first-class support for muti-sig and offline signatures (with or without a hardware wallet) check out Sparrow

If you're looking for something to carry around with you in your phone to have continuous access to a small amount of funds, I recommend bluewallet because it supports watch-only wallets, lightning using a personal self-sovereign lightning bank to exchange between family and friends for free, and single-sig and muti-sig wallets.

Lightning is a different matter, and is intended for day-to-day spending, not for long-term privacy or storage. There are three ways to 'do lightning', and I recommend playing around with it. The first way is to use a custodial wallet where you pay fees to move funds in and out of the wallet to a wallet provider. Bluewallet, Alby, Strike, WOS, Muun and CashApp provide this service. The second is to run a simple lightning node on your own always-connected computer (LND, C-Lightning and Eclaire) and connect to it with a mobile lightning wallet like Zap and Eclaire. The third is a solution created by BlueWallet called LNDHub which provides a wrapper around LND but allows many lightning wallets share the single lightning wallet hosted by your always-on LND node.

There are simple ways of setting this up, and if you have any interest in lightning, I recommend that you install Umbrel on a Raspberry Pi4b with an external 1TB (or larger) drive, or if that's too complicated buy a Start9 node. You can install the LNDHub plugin and connect to it with Bluewallet (Android, IOs or MAC) or Alby (chromium browser plugin).

The ancillary advantage to running Umbrel or Start9 locally is you also get a electrum server which provides a high-degree of security with regard to checking your on-chain balances with a wallet that supports it (like Sparrow and Bluewallet). Since you're using a local electrum server to read your wallet balance, you aren't leaking information to public servers and thereby linking your IP address with your bitcoin wallet address (and therefore your balance)

I haven't noted a single link to reference for you simply because I haven't been in the market for it. Unfortunately, I'm a somewhat advanced user with a computer engineering background and having been involved with crypto for almost a decade. Like the carpenter who's house is falling apart, or the plumber who's wife complains about the eternally plugged drain, I haven't spent enough time in the crypto-advocacy space to have found a single source for the newbie looking to disabuse the media's lies.

Finally I want to mention an important future advancement in crypto that likely will emerge out of bitcoin. This is the idea of minting offline e-cash, a way to spend a digital balance without being connected to the internet. The idea of E-cash with asymmetric cryptography and blind signatures was written about in the early 80's. Since then there have been improvements to this idea and recently there are some stirrings about minting bitcoin-backed E-cash on lightning.

This could mean that Juan Valdez can deliver his mountain-grown Columbia coffee on his donkey-cart and be sure he is paid-in-full on his I-phone without having access to the internet. This provides a path toward completely private and off-the-grid payments. Now tell me how is dictator Trudy going to interfere with that?