500

Fair point on the number of transactions. But most people (and maybe not even the majority in this thread because we are all financial wizards here), probably have Coinbase pull from their savings/checking which is paying them 10 bps or less. So in that regard, the cash sitting as USDC is an interesting alternative.

My only complaint is that Coinbase won’t let me setup recurring USDC/BTC swaps. Only USD…

Happy 500 CryptoBros..

May we continue to set new ATHs this year and beyond.

500 pages ago when this thread started, $17,800 was necessary to buy one bitcoin

For me I buy and hodl, don't really plan on doing anything with it for probably 15 years when I reach retirement.
On my tax return it asks did I "sell, exchange, gift or otherwise dispose of a digital asset (or a financial interest in a digital asset)?", I have always been able to answer no. Now I will have to report yes, just don't see how it is any of their business. They don't ask if I have sold gold/silver, jewelry, baseball cards, matchbox cars or Pokémon cards, I don't feel I should have to inform them of my crypto purchases either.

Recommendations for backing up seed phrase?

Tattoo

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https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09DKP6GMW/ref=sspa_dk_detail_0?pd_rd_i=B09DKP6GMW&pd_rd_w=TxwAk&content-id=amzn1.sym.386c274b-4bfe-4421-9052-a1a56db557ab&pf_rd_p=386c274b-4bfe-4421-9052-a1a56db557ab&pf_rd_r=0NPKSNK0TB1HZW63J0E0&pd_rd_wg=6cmbL&pd_rd_r=e6ec65df-7cf5-41ea-8e3d-1b839c78aa94&s=office-products&sp_csd=d2lkZ2V0TmFtZT1zcF9kZXRhaWxfdGhlbWF0aWM&th=1

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24 stainless washers and letter/number punches, can buy the blockmit at etsy I believe, I 3D printed mine.

Unrelated.

I recently had a 14hr flight where I may have ”invented” a way to generate and restore private keys without the need to remember a seed phrase. It could be built in to both cold wallets (with a basic hardware upgrade) and hot wallets.

I want to put it up for discussion, but it’s one of those dumb ideas that just might address some of our collective concerns and actually be viable.

It’d be interesting to see some analytics during events like this.  Ie. Who is selling and who is buying?  

I wonder how crazy it is to assume that a nation considers market impacts before they say/do things?  

These weekend dips are making it hard to stay only in the ETFs, Fire sales like this make me want to exercise that fidelity crypto account I opened!

Looks interesting. Care to give a short review?

Why 24 washers and a fancy jig - that seems overly complicated?  
Why not a piece of metal about the size of a key?  Why not a dog tag?  



What happens when the chinesium screws loosen and the letters fall out?  
A $10 set of harbor freight letter punches and a piece of metal is safer and cheaper.

If you're looking for a safe haven/hedge to turmoil in the world crypto isn't it. At least not yet. It spooks very easily and runs and hides until it sees a light at the end of the tunnel. Similar to all speculative investments that are the first to get liquidated when the markets pivot to risk-off mode.

When BTC crashed to less than 5K during covid I knew this is not something a guy can rely on as a P2P survival prep currency. Now that it is being handed over to Wall Street to be accumulated and manipulated by slimy hedge fund sharks who have little to no interest in its original purpose and goal I trust it's price stability during a black swan event even less.

I just put a 1/4-20 bolt through the washers and it makes a nice stack, washers were leftover from a work project and borrowed the punches, only cost was some PETG to print the blockmit. It was simple and easy to do, you can also separate the seed phrase for extra security if desired.

Yikes!  That seems like a bad idea - like taking apart a gun and storing the pieces separately so it doesn’t get stolen.  

Then you have 24 things to keep track of and the loss of any one of those 24 things means you lose all your bitcoin!

I don't do it, in fact I made 2 sets for redundancy but there are people who like having 2 separate keys to open something.

I have the older, unavailable version:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07RZW8CWY/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_search_asin_title?ie=UTF8&psc=1

It works, I like it. I might get the newer version I posted above. It seems the newer addresses a few issues with the old (deeper engraving etc).
High quality units IMO.


Yeah no.

I’d rather have 2 sets than half a set. My hiding places will not be found. But there’s always the possibility of losing physical access to a location. Not so with “site-redundancy.”

I use an air-gapped Ellipal Titan and Seed Phase Case.

I have had zero issues using this as a cold storage wallet solution in keeping my crypto off an exchange. I mostly use Coinbase these days due to ease of use.

Flame away!

https://store.coinkite.com/store/seedplate

My first BTC purchase:

Reference code   xxxxxx   Price    $4,374.96     Payment method   USD Wallet   Coinbase fee   $2.99   Subtotal  $197.01  Total   $200.00

Date    10:54 AM – Sep 04, 2017

WTH

So jealous

Back the truck up

I'd recommend only buying ETFs if you have to for tax reasons.

It's easy to buy and store your own BTC, and buy 24/7. I don't recommend "trading" though.

I like this in concept and ease, but I fear it would get thrown away before a stamped or engraved metal plate would.

I actually tried to do the stamped plate thing, but the stainless steel sheet I bought was too thick to imprint.  Need to get a thinner piece.

Not sure if anyone had considered the little Ti storage capsules you can get on Countycom, but for hiding and portability, a slip of paper inside could be better than a metal plate.  Wouldn't be fireproof.

What’s the difference between profit from an ETF and profit from bitcoin?
I’ve got as much of my retirement money in the ETFs as I want, I only have a pile of taxable money to buy now and have no interest in holding my own bitcoin.  

Ok, I’m in for .03 BTC.

Either way, it's treated as capital gains.

Bitcoin was created to minimize counterparty risk. You hold your own wealth. It can't be confiscated. Its use can't be censored. It is easy to move, even across borders. It maximizes personal sovereignty. This was the ethos of the early adopters. ETFs are "convenient", but weaken all those characteristics I mentioned.

I've bought etf with a rollover IRA that I had sitting around from years ago so that will be taxed when I retire but figured etf was better then the under performing company stock it was in. I just setup a Roth IRA so I can buy some etf that will be capital gains free, might try to buy and sell the highs and lows since there is no taxable events. But my main holding is the digital asset (btc) it's self on a hardware wallet and that is for future use or wealth preservation for my kids.

I bought another one. YMMV.

Happy 500!

I’m curious how much bitcoin people really keep in their own hardware wallets?  
I read an article a few months ago about the largest bitcoin balances, and many of the exchanges and other companies with large amounts of bitcoin had coins spread across multiple wallets, I assumed this was to eliminate the possibility of losing all your bitcoin with a single point of failure?

I have enough money in the ETFs that there’s no way I’d attempt to store something that valuable on a piece of electronic hardware.  One Faulty chip, one leaky capacitor, one house fire/flood/tornado and it could all vanish and there’s nothing you can do to get it back.  

Help me out here…. You can’t put the same bitcoin on two different hardware wallets, correct?  You always have only a single piece of hardware to hold a given wallet?

LOL

Your crypto lives on the blockchain.  It does NOT live on a hardware wallet.  

The hardware wallet is a front door.  You can lose or destroy the front door and always buy a new/different front door.  It's the KEYS (seed phrase) that you have to protect.

Yep, hence the seed phase, if my hardware wallet quits working, gets destroyed or lost then I can get another wallet that is BIP39 compliant and restore the claim to the part of the block chain I own. I probably don't hold anywhere near what others do on my hardware wallet but to me it is alot, I will just keep adding to it and once I have my hands on this limited asset, it will take alot to get me to sell.

The vast majority of BTC was mined/purchased before ETFs existed. That majority of BTC is largely in diamond hands.

Yes, people hold large amts of BTC on private hard wallets. The majority probably do (although some misguided individuals leave large amts on exchanges). There are ways to protect that stash with things like multisig.

I've been in the game far longer than most in this thread. I'm being light on details for a reason. I've got lots of btc and many others I mined many many years ago for the price of a graphics card and a few blades.

But the crypto following the $$$ based markets is the exact opposite of the message the crypto fanatics are attempting to convey. The markets have become too big of players IMHO for crypto to continue its rallying cry.

Jameson Lopp has done extensive testing on metal seed backups but he stopped updating the effort a while back.  There were some surprising failures.  He hates stamping the metal, but that's because he's done it 8 bazillion times for his reviews.  If you're just doing a few of these backups the stamping is no big hassle.



Second this option.  The Blockmit gizmo works well but they can be cracked with an errant hammer blow; they're cheap so buy two or three.

Here are a few tweaks on the stainless washer backup:

*Consider buying the washers from a reputable American company.  I got some of the cheap Chinesium "stainless" washers and had a buddy with access run one through a spectrometer to evaluate their content.  It had so little chromium that he said it was a crime to call it "stainless".  What would result if you had to rely on this backup after a flood or exposure to something caustic?  Dunno, but is it worth the risk to your stack to save less than $20?  And who knows what other bullshit variations you'll have in the Chinesium hardware.

*Put a piece of masking tape on the bottom of the stamping jig, sticky side up.  Then lay the washer in the jig.  The tape keeps the washer from jiggling around between stampings.

*You'll probably be doing the stamping indoors on a vise anvil.  Seriously, wear eye and ear protection.  This is exactly the kind of sharp impulse noise that hurts your hearing.  The steel stamps can shatter unexpectedly.

*You can make a more compact package by getting 4 seed words on each washer.  Let's say words 1, 2, 3, and 4 are "dogecoin", "booger", "snotface" and "bidensucks" (I have submitted a BIP to add these words...).  Only the first 4 letters of each word matter so on one side of washer #1 you stamp:

"0102" across the top then
"dogeboog" across the bottom

Then on the back side of washer #1 stamp:
"0304" across the top then
"snotbide" across the bottom

Now you have all the info needed for seed words 1-4 on one washer, and in proper order.  Continue down the list, and the stack is only 6 washers instead of 24.  The Blockmit jig has 2 slots across the top and 8 on the bottom, so a little tweaking will allow stamping the four word numbers across the top of the washer.  Anyone smart enough to be restoring a BTC wallet from a seedphrase will recognize the word/character pattern.

I did not realize you could replace a hardware wallet without access to it, that makes it completely reasonable.

Yeah without that feature I couldn't trust investing in BTC.  Knowing I can restore the wallet data anywhere, anytime to most any wallet platform just by knowing the words (one way or another) allows me to sleep at night.

It did what now?

You heard the man correctly.

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This meme was borne of it:

Here's the best mix of all of that...

When I get butterflies in my stomach that maybe I've made a grave rounding error and Bitcoin is actually going to ZERO, I just sit back, relax, and turn on this:



Then I RAGE smash buy with everything left in my account.  

Huh. I missed that I guess.

This time the Bogdanoffs are not here to stop us.

just did 1.2 sol into 50.6 and fumbled the trade

should have been 70-80

even when you're winning this market figures out a way to break your brain

Maybe a buy-worthy dip today?  Not just for bitcoin, but for everything!
No readily apparent change in the ETF flows.  If the bitcoin price is attributable to iran/Israel then it should bounce back after Israel bombs Iranian stuff within a day or two.

Read this in the news, perhaps good fuel for some extra demand once they become available:

I bought this dip.  Price is good in terms of the last month at least.