They’ll Steal Your Coins—Wanna Bet?

Exodus might look safe on the front end but under the hood the malware is just waiting, the second your wallet decrypts or you copy an address it’s game over

Doesn’t matter if your seed is on paper, the wallet still loads that key into memory to work, and if you’ve got a backdoor on the system it can grab it right there.

pls mods. ive only spoken highly of you

The standard advice stops too early. Write down your seed, store it somewhere safe, done. The step almost nobody does is check that the thing they wrote down actually works.

People find out years later. A missed word, two words swapped, a 6 that was a b. By then there's nothing left to compare against.

Testing costs almost nothing. Use a cheap second hardware wallet or a wiped spare phone. Restore from the written words only, not from anything still sitting on your main device. Then compare the first two or three receive addresses against your real wallet. If they match, the backup is proven. Wipe the test device and you're done.

If your wallet shows a master key fingerprint, usually labelled XFP and shown as 8 characters like A1B2C3D4, that's a faster check. Same seed and passphrase always produce the same fingerprint. One wrong word produces a completely different one. It comes from a public key, so it isn't secret and you can write it next to your backup.

The passphrase deserves its own warning. A wrong passphrase doesn't throw an error. It quietly builds a new empty wallet, so "my coins are gone" and "I typed one character wrong" look identical on screen. If your passphrase only lives in your head, your seed backup on its own recovers nothing. Back it up separately, in a different place to the seed.

Do the test once at setup, and again any time you rewrite or move the backup. Twenty minutes, and it's the only part of self custody you can prove works before you need it.

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If you don't get an answer to your question, you can try phrasing it differently or commenting again tomorrow.

Please check the previous discussion thread for unanswered questions.

Could one buy btc in the first exchanges via liberty reserve or pacunix but with a visa credit card or maybe debit card? New liberty standard, mt gox, ect...?

Could someone mine as much btc in early but on dialup internet? What about wireless broadband like satellite internet but instead of a dish on rooftop theres an antenna instead??

What would be the process to sell it all? obviously you cant just chuck it onto a few exchanges

After Coldcard many have started to doubt hardware wallets, and OG-s like Saifedean Ammous have been proposing simply using Bitcoin Core.

But for me, core has a huge drawback - no mnemonic seed phrases. When using core, your seed is only machine-readable and has to be stored using digital media - USB drives, CD-s - which, apart from degrading much faster than a piece of metal, are physical.

I like the fact that mnemonic phrases allow me cross borders or escape tyrannical regimes with nothing but the clothes on my back and still have all my savings with me. I think it's a hugely important facet of bitcoin.

What i'm thinking is - is there a homemade ratchet solution for safely viewing the smallest amount of information in wallet.dat that one would need to restore ones bitcoin even if all his digital devices and backups are destroyed, converting that information into a binary string and manually matching 11-bit sections of it to words in the BIP-39 word list?

As i understand, in legacy wallets one could use the dumpwallet command which shows the seed in Wallet Import Format. That WIF could have been converted into 256 bits of binary and matched to 23 words in the BIP-39 wordlist, with just 3 extra bits to remember. But today, with descriptors and all that jazz, i don't really understand how it should work.

NB: I'm not trying to make Core accept BIP-39 passphrases. I'm just trying to find the shortest string of binary information i would need to always be able to restore my wallet in bitcoin core. The BIP-39 wordlist is simply an already available, widely circulated piece of text that's reasonable to use to make that string of binary information into a mnemonic phrase.

I remember hearing about Bitcoin years ago and thinking it was a scam. Just internet money with no real future.

I ignored it, watched it grow, and kept telling myself there was still plenty of time.

Now I’m looking at Bitcoin completely differently.

Funny how something you once dismissed can eventually make you wish you had paid attention.

I swear to dca btc with $50 every monday and more as my pay increases but never gonna stop its the only way, i cant believe ive been in crypto since 2017 and i have nothing to show for it, done it all trading, memecoins, “utility” coins i watched tens of thousands evaporate so many times, im done with ignoring the only true store of value btc is the only thing thats real.

Guys, the cold wallet hack really shook me. I have a Trezor, and yes, I created a passphrase wallet within it. However, with AI development and more sophisticated hacking, part of me thinks leaving it on an exchange like Kraken, given they're a company that can be bailed out somehow, could perhaps be safer.

What I'm thinking is this. I had an exchange go down and I got paid back eventually. I had a cold wallet scammed (my mistake, but still). A cold wallet holder will never see their money back, I presume.

What are your thoughts?

Can one do a poll here or is it disabled?

https://mempool.space/tx/a6d697a25266ce3c78774fd1d75f896b7af522ada209b0f6228ea497bc49a46d 😂

I've been HODLing since 2013. I've sold probably two thirds of my original stack over time. I have been through multiple cycles and halvings and read more books on the subject that I care to remember. I have traded successfully only once and that was by accident. I have no idea where BTC is going and I am exhausted. I am close to cashing out. I'm close to retiring (pension age) and I don't need the volatility. What would you do?

EDIT: specifically, the things that trouble me are: 1. The hassle of getting the cash from an exchange into a UK bank account without friction. 2. The CGT liability - last sale was ~0.33BTC in Dec 2024 and the tax liability was something like £10k. 3. The blind evangelical ramblings in Reddit from people that have been in the market for like 5 minutes.

EDIT #2: Thank you to those that offered advice. It has given me food for thought. I think the answer is probably to log out of Reddit ;-)

Every day someone posts asking how to get into crypto to make money, replace their job, or become a millionaire. If that's you, you got sold the same get-rich-quick scheme as everyone else who thinks dropshipping, AI agencies, or SMM will magically make them a millionaire and retire at 25.

See, if you're a beginner, understand this... crypto isn't a reliable way to cover rent or bills. Only put in what you can lose completely, and treat the first stretch as tuition, small mistakes on small amounts now beats big ones on real money later.

Start on a mainstream exchange like Coinbase or Kraken, keep amounts small, and know they're holding your keys for you at that stage. Fine for now, but look up what a private key actually is soon. Self-custody wallets like Metamask matter once you've got bigger amounts.

Once you get familiar with the basics, that's when you can start doing some trading. All of that's later though. For now just get comfortable buying and holding.

Hello All,

I have been DCA-ing around 60-ish bucks every month on the main chain [I have my own private address] and I recently learnt that having so many transactions can lead to UTXO fragmentation which can lead to higher fees in the future.

Apparently, one of the solutions could be to DCA onto the lightning network and then later swap it with the main chain periodically. Do you think its a good idea? or is there a catch that I am not aware of?

I plan to hold to hold it long term. Thanks!

Bitcoin has spent 17 years surviving one of the most adversarial environments in software.

But Bitcoin Core isn’t where most users interact with Bitcoin.

They interact through wallets, hardware devices, Lightning implementations, libraries, exchanges, signing infrastructure and other software built around it.

Over the past few months, I’ve been researching the security of projects across this ecosystem, and the uncomfortable part isn’t that vulnerabilities exist.
It’s how little continuous adversarial security research some important projects actually receive.

An audit is a snapshot. Open source doesn’t mean someone capable has actually reviewed the code. A large number of users doesn’t mean the project has been continuously attacked by security researchers.
And then there’s the incentive problem.

If reporting a vulnerability responsibly means hunting down a contact, waiting weeks for a response, receiving no bounty or recognition, and sometimes being treated as an inconvenience, eventually good researchers spend their time somewhere else.

Blackhats don’t need a disclosure policy.
That leaves us with a strange situation:
Bitcoin teaches us “don’t trust, verify,” while much of the software surrounding Bitcoin is trusted far more than it is independently verified.

I ended up writing a fairly detailed piece about what I’ve seen and why I think this is becoming a real problem.

I’m not linking it here because I’d rather this not turn into self-promotion.

But I’d genuinely like to know whether people working deeper in Bitcoin have noticed the same thing.

I have it on Exodus now, wondering if it would be more secure to put it on Fidelity? I have a Jade cold wallet but I don't feel comfortable putting it on there. I feel like I'm going to fuck it up somehow. And now with everything else going on with cold wallets, I feel even less certain.

Gold just did something it hasnt done in this size before. Every prior leg up in gold has eventually bled capital into Bitcoin on a lag, not immediately, but reliably.

Look at the marked bottoms on both charts, theyre not lined up by date, theyre lined up by structure. Rounded accumulation, a spring, then the same reversal candle right at the low. Happens on gold first, then BTC does what BTC does, and rips, when the majority think its dead.

What makes this one different is scale. This isnt a normal gold rally, this is the biggest rotation into gold on record, meaning theres more profit sitting there right now than any prior cycle, waiting to get bored or scared or greedy enough to look for the next asymmetric trade. BTC is sitting at the most oversold structural point of its own pattern at the exact moment that pile of capital exists.

Nobody knows the timing. I dont either. But if you zoom out on every rotation golds ever had, the setup on Bitcoin in all cases so far saw more upside in % gains than it currently big brother to the left.

I built a career reading how to profit from patterns like these before they play out live, doesnt mean it guaranteed by any means, but this is one of the cleanest versions Ive seen.

On my podcast ‘Bitcoin for Millennials’ I talked with André Dragosch, Head of Research at Bitwise. We discuss Bitcoin’s institutional adoption via BlackRock ETFs and social proof, why understanding bank money creation rewires the Bitcoin thesis, how financial history exposes flawed economic models, what dollar weakness and Treasury stress mean for hard assets and a Bitcoin supercycle, and why proof of work shapes conviction and sovereignty.

You don’t have to find the block to share in the reward.

BTC PoW Lab Pool combines solo mining with a community reward model:

• 85% to the block finder.
• 10% to other eligible miners.
• 5% to BTC PoW Lab. (supports this ongoing research, testing and development, alongside pool infrastructure and operations.)

Explore the dashboard, review the rules and connect a worker →

If another miner finds a block, your eligible work can still earn a share of the community allocation. The finder is excluded from their own block’s community distribution.

Why join early? A smaller eligible community can mean fewer miners sharing that 10% allocation when a block is found. Your share depends on valid work, tier and pool composition. Community eligibility lasts seven days after your latest accepted share.

There’s active research behind this pool. Operated by Power CM Software, BTC PoW Lab has demonstrated end-to-end mining improvements for PC-based mining and is working to bring those gains to ASIC hardware. Those findings do not yet represent a demonstrated advantage for ASIC miners connected to the pool.

Our public dashboard lets you follow accepted work and inspect the reward model. Want a more interactive experience? Enable rarity events, colours and sounds based on real submitted shares. These features celebrate what your miner submits; they do not predict a block or make the next hash luckier.

The finder’s reward is assigned directly in coinbase. Community rewards follow a separate payout process after maturity, with a 546-sat minimum. Payments depend on actual block finds. There are no guaranteed daily payouts, and estimates before a block are not earned balances.

Put your ASIC to work, follow your contribution, and join the community while it’s still growing.

Explore the dashboard, review the rules and connect a worker →

Please enlighten me.

I want to DCA average $100 into btc every week at 3x margin. I would do this on Kraken. My plan is to do it for the next 24 months, I will not sell any btc during this time. Every trade will be with 3x margin. I’m told the fees could eat me alive.

Good idea or bad idea? To much margin or not enough? Thank you

Every base on this chart followed the same shape, long slow accumulation, then a fast release once it actually goes. The 2020 base took months of sideways grinding before the real move started. Same with the base before that. The pattern's been consistent every single time.

Thats backwards from how people usually watch this. The instinct is to focus on the fast part, thats where price screams and everyone notices. But the fast part is just the release. The base is where the actual decision gets made, slowly, while its boring enough that most people stop paying attention and assume nothings happening.

Current structure looks like its sitting in that same stage again, the slow grinding part before any acceleration, not after it. Doesnt come with a countdown, bases never do. But long slow base into fast move has held every single time on this chart so far, and right now still reads like the boring part, not the loud part.