Hey everyone! Long time lurker, finally got the courage to create an account and post.
I’m the “Uncle Jim” for friends and family. I’ve setup several cold cards (with Sparrow), bitcoin nodes, and just recently paid my barber over lightning for the first time. (She wants to continue!)
My question is, I’m in the process of setting up older family members over the next few weeks who aren’t tech savvy and might have a difficult time figuring out how to store a single sig wallet and keeping track of their seed phrase. (They’re in a different state otherwise I would have set them up myself.)
I’ve been debating whether to just help them get setup with something like Unchained and I’ve even considered Bitkey, but every time I start debating with myself, I always come back to Cold Card, Sparrow and being connected to your own node.
Obviously there’s tradeoffs for every avenue, and I’m thinking about their attack vectors, which I believe for them are losing and / or misplacing their seed phrase and with something like Unchained, privacy. I feel like I’m starting to answer my own question as I write this too! The older folks I’m going to setup will be saving a significant amount so I just want to make sure once they’re setup, they can just not worry about it anymore and continue to stay humble and stack sats. 

Where do you sit on setting up your family and friends on Single Sig vs Multi Sig?
34 sats \ 4 replies \ @senf 23 Jan
Set them up with a BIP85 seed based on yours, and tell them you're doing so.
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I thought about that but feel like they should hold full custody of their own seed. I’m happy to help set them up with how to do everything but don’t wan to become a central point of failure.
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Safe to assume that you feel Samourai takes the cake over Sparrow. Outside of what you mentioned above, any other reasons you might feel Samourai is superior?
Thanks for the suggestions and I’m a big fan of Mutiny and Phoenix, although Mutiny is the winner for me.
I’ve read a lot about the 12 or 24 word seed phrase debate and the consensus seems to be that either is fine, although I’ve yet to personally recommend a 12 word seed phrase.
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I am also the Uncle Jim in my circles. I have been starting people with single sig cold cards with Sparrow and/or a watch only Blue wallet on the phone. I don't think the 24 words is overwhelming. 12 or 24 words, they need to keep them in a very secure place. That maybe is the hard part for some. The people I have been helping don't really plan on spending much. Sometimes setting up Mutiny with a little "spare change" amount in it to just play with (send back and forth to me, mostly.) I have yet to put anyone into a multi sig. They are usually having enough of a struggle keeping it all straight with the single sig. If I ever was helping someone with a massive amount of funds I would probably recommend for them something like an Unchained multisig.
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Yea I hear you. I believe the scenario I’ll be in with helping out the older person is it’ll be a massive amount of funds and that’s why something like Unchained came to mind.
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Thank you for this!
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