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21 sats \ 3 replies \ @Solomonsatoshi 1 Dec \ parent \ on: Why do you eat meat? food_and_drinks
IMO always better to learn how to build your own cold storage rather than be reliant upon third party HWs.
Use a usb Linux OS that never goes online for your cold wallet.
https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/coldstorage.html
https://itsfoss.com/intsall-ubuntu-on-usb/
The witch hunt behaviour is something we can be vigilant to as it is easily overlooked...pointing out examples would not help you be more vigilant.
Thank you for the guides!
Maybe just one thing, it looks to me like in the second link we install Ubuntu persistently, so any time you would use it the data would still be there after power off. So if someone is worried about what people refer to the evil maid attack, I would be careful.
In my case I like to use encryption with a simple pin code when installing Linux, it allows me to have some piece of mind if my hardware get stolen (not just for Bitcoin).
My DIY wallets at the moment are only the Jade firmware on a M5 stack and the seed signer on a raspberry pi zero. Never tried USB stick for Bitcoin yet (although I played with some others for curiosity in the past)
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You can encrypt any Linux installation if you want to...including usb ones.
You can also just destroy it once you have the seed phrase as seed phrase is all that is needed to regain access to the wallet.
You can use a view only wallet and make deposits without the usb.
Far safer than being dependent upon a third party HW wallet...because in the process of using usb OS to create offline wallet and Electrum cold storage you learn how it operates whereas most HW users remain ignorant as to how it works and dependent upon the gadget.
Only possible advantage with Jade or other HWs is ease of outgoing payments transactions and so if you are trading as opposed to stacking maybe useful- good luck with trading.
Even then any competent trader would probably be better off learning how to generate offline payments without dependence on third party HW and software gadgets.
ie HWs are a waste of time and create greater risk exposure and dependency.
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I see, maybe I have some minor disagreements but it makes sense to me.
In my case I really learned a lot by doing transactions directly with btcd, the golang library. Also I didn't read it until the end because I was busy with other things, but the book of Jimmy Song is quite good. But I guess your focus is mainly on the hardware part. If this is the case, sure I agree by generating keys and doing transactions with a software which doesn't hide too much the complexity, you learn the naming and other stuff. So in this respect I agree this is beneficial.
To be honest I did some trading 4 years ago and read a book about trading but I stopped almost immediately as it was stressful and couldn't focus on work and other things more meaningful to me. Now I am in Bitcoin mainly for my pension and to save money, so like you I think, I stack as well.
I totally agree about the necessity to try offline payments, however I think other hardware wallets providers all bring something interesting to the table. Blockstream provides also the software to build our own hardware wallet. With this firmware for example we can use the camera and keep the device stateless (the private key is removed from memory after power off), and we can use it with Green to send money from L-BTC to lightning. In my case I use it this way, if I need to top up Lightning I have my L-BTC ready to be changed into sats with low fees, whatever the current state of the mempool on mainnet. And the rest of my stack, my future pension when I will be 60 yo, is on mainnet.
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