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Resilience is about being able to safely traverse difficulties, danger or threats without significant loss.
Bitcoiners have been thinking about ways to make themselves, their families, and their lives more resilient in all sorts of aspects. One of those is typically the security of their bitcoin in their own custody.
Ignoring HOW you choose to custody your bitcoin, it is a common 'escape hatch' that if <EVENT> happens, then I'll move my coins to a new wallet. Typical example is one of a set of keys in a multi-sig is lost/stolen/compromised. Another could be the tamper-proof bag holding a seed plate or passphrase being violated - or potentially violated.
So again, IGNORING HOW you choose to custody your bitcoin, you now have a need to move them.
Two things will simultaneously be in play:
  1. You will have a sense of urgency
  2. You will be in a heightened state of stress
These two things do NOT help thinking coolly and calmly about best practice for creating a new wallet and from that, a new address. You may also not be in a place, time or environment to do so. This is the time when you want to grab that pre-prepared wallet/address/xpub from a safe place and think: Faarque .. but I got this covered.
So pick a quiet time, and go through your routine for creating a new wallet; protect those seed words and the passphrase, and then keep the xpub or the address in a place that is easily accessible.
Well done - you've increased your resiliency, and hopefully, like house insurance, you never have to use it!
The need for practice in establishing this kind of know-how can't be over-stated. Every so often you should recreate everything, soup to nuts. Run through the steps, just like they do on nuclear submarines, so that when it matters it's something you've done many times already.
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Faarque me... that's an excellent post!
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Okay what does Faarque here mean? I didn’t catch the reference haha
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Always have a wallet a click away with Mutiny
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I have an extra seed memorized along with one of the deposit pub hashes just for that case. Memorizing a seed is pretty easy, but it took a long time to memorize the deposit address. That’s one I only recently felt comfortable with but having that as a failsafe in my head makes me feel better.
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Why would you need to memorise the desposit address?
EDIT: I guess it's useful to have the address handy without entering (and potentially compromising) the seed used to generate it. Plus the address has a checksum in case you misremember a character. Interesting, never considered this before.
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That’s the point. I created this seed after reading American Kingpin when I got to the part where the dumb cop stole a bunch of Silk Road bitcoin by sending it to his Coinbase account and then bought a boat and ended up in jail—not that I expect to stumble upon dark web bitcoin that I need to exfiltrate or whatever, but it got me thinking that if there ever was a situation where I wanted to arrange an anonymous transfer of bitcoin, I wouldn’t want to login to Coinbase or any other exchange to get a KYC deposit address, and I wouldn’t want to use any other address that I’ve generated that’s ever seen the light of day, so it got me thinking that it was worth it to set this up for the unknown emergency cases that you don’t expect. Like what if I’m visiting another country and a secret agent offers me bitcoin to do some wetwork? 🤣
the thing about the unexpected is that its hard to plan for what you might need to expect.
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That's probably not going to work out well if you need to use it.
You don't need to memorize an address. Memorizing a seed is risky enough, just make sure you have a steel backup somewhere
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You never know when you might need to type an emergency bitcoin receiving address into a phone in a foreign country. Lots of uses for a memorized deposit address that’s never seen a public network.
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Unless you literally repeat it to yourself everyday, you're likely to forget it.
Its a bad idea IMO
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To add on, you don’t have to do everything within one day. Break it down into several actionable tasks n finish one task during your spare pockets of time every day. This way, you won’t take long. Just 15 minutes a day.
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I will also add keep it simple if you can. If you die or something happens to you and people need access to your stack to live life make sure they understand your setup. Practice doing transactions how to send to and out of an exchange just increase they need dollars
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what wallet do you suggest?
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