I have some Bitcoin and Ethereum on Coinbase since 2018. Coinbase never failed me, but they ask for more and more personal details. Last requests made me look for alternatives. I read wasabi is one of the best privacy focused wallets, but what do you use? Im not trying to hide anything from goverment or anything like that, I just want safe place for coins that doesnt feel like someone is tracking every single step I make
Edit: made sentence more clear
The coins are on the blockchain, what you save in a wallet are the keys to access them.
Contrary to the common believe you don’t need a hardware wallet to keep your keys safe, what you really need is a air gapped or cold storage and you can achieve this in many ways. I found that one of the best ways to do it is grabbing an old phone and following this guide
https://medium.com/@fbonomi/a-bitcoin-cold-wallet-based-on-qr-codes-e8c130b3181f
Tldr: install the wallet and never connect the phone to the internet again and use QR codes to sign transactions using the camera. Super practical, cheap, truly air gapped and doesn’t attract attention like a hardware wallet. Additionally I would disable the wallet app when you don’t use it, so the wallet will not be visible in case someone else grabs the phone (you can do this by installing the app as a system app using adb). And don’t forget to save the seeds of the wallet in safe place and always use fully FOSS wallets like electrum.
Thanks. This looks perfect and I have an old phone that I could use for that. But im bit worried if I dont use wallet for 5 years and then realize the old phone is not working anymore. I can still recover with seeds (12 word backup) right? I guess Im asking the question that has the answer already, but want to be sure
Absolutely. All you need to recover your keys are the 12 words. Never save the 12 words alone, If someone come across them it will be obvious what they are. Write a little essay of one page of length or less about whatever topic and hide the words in it (like every 13 words or whatever method you like that its easy to remember). Nobody has to know that you save your keys in this way. For me the key to save the seeds safely is disguise, simply because they are just words and its easy to do it. Hide the essay among other documents and that’s it. If nobody knows that that’s the way you save them there is no way they can figure it out. That way you can leave them in many places for additional safety.
This is a great idea until you forget whatever trick you used to encode the words onto that page, which becomes more and more likely the longer you store it and don’t look at it. Have fun trying all the combinations for the 250 words you put on the page, if you can even recognize the page in your pile of papers since there’s I’m assuming you don’t have “SEED PHRASE” plastered across it in big letters.
You won’t have to try the combinations of 250 words because the seeds are words at equally spaced distance so at most you have to try 20 combinations. And that’s supposing that all the 250 words are from the seed list, which obviously is not going to happen, so you only have to try a few valid combinations if you forget the number 13. So all you have to remember is the title of the essay and that the seeds are equally spaced, and even the later is not necessary if you think about it just a little bit (just don’t use words from the bip39 wordlist for the rest) and I expect that you are not dumb enough to save the page in only one single place among thousands of other pages. If you want you can save the page in the same way you would save the 12 words, may be with a couple of other documents, but the point is not saving a paper with just 12 words!
What is wrong with a paper wallet? An offline “cold storage” approach
Ive heard about paper wallet, but honestly I cant keep my papers safe enough to trust that approach.
A hardware wallet is a great option, so is cold storage which you can do with a cheap $50 laptop. Most important is keeping backups. Think about how you will access your coins when your laptop or hardware wallet dies. Think about ways to prevent loss due to natural disaster. Multi-sig and shamirs secret sharing scheme are two ways to store coins in such a way that you won’t lose them if your house burns down without having to trust a single party to custody them.
Is it enough to keep 12 words safe? Is there any other way to backup? Not sure what you meant with multi-sig and shamirs
Yes, if you have your 12-word seed, that’s all you need.
Note: If you have a self-custody Bitcoin lightning wallet, you also need to backup your wallet “state”. You also need to let your wallet access the internet every once and a while to monitor channel states to prevent theft of funds by somebody closing a channel and broadcasting an old state. Lightning is not designed for long-term storage, so don’t use it for that purpose. Every wallet handles backup differently. Phoenix makes this automatic, it’s awesome. Or you can just consider your lightning wallet your everyday spending money, not keep big amounts in it, not worry about backing it up. That’s what I do. I figure the $25 I have on my phone is the least of my concerns if my house burns down.
Multi-sig is a type of wallet where in order to spend money from it, multiple other wallets need to sign off on the transaction. These wallets can be your friends/family, your bank, or other trusted custodian. You can set a threshold: 2 of 3 wallets, all wallets (bad idea! You lose all your funds if you lose a single wallet). It’s a great way to custody funds long-term safely while eliminating single points of failure.
Shamir’s secret sharing scheme can split your seed phrase into multiple parts. You can give those parts to other people, the key can’t be re-assembled without the requisite number of parts (threshold) which is set by you. If somebody’s part gets lost or stolen, no problem, nobody can do anything unless they have enough parts.
Thank you a lot for detailed answer
From worst to best places to store your crypto:
- Online KYC exchange
- Online non KYC exchange
- Offline on your computer/phone
- Offline on a USB key/SD card
- Offline on a cold storage like Ledger or Trezor
Ok I see Coinbase is 1, but it used to be 2 AFAIK. Ill probably use my old phone, will try it these days.
Thank you for the list, its much more clear now
What non KYC exchange exist today do you know? I guess I could use one in the future when I decide to exchange from crypto to crypto or from crypto to $
Thank you <3
Not your keys not your coins.
If your just storing long term, look at paper wallets. Totally offline is the gold standard, it can’t be hacked
A hardware wallet like the trezor, or if you want to read a bit into what ledger has been doing one of those (they had a few controversial changes)
This or at least something self-custodial. Anything with Blockchain is inherently public, but the problem with centralized exchanges is that they hold the tokens for you (or worse, Contract For Difference), and really only have a fraction of the true capital to unwind if shit hits the fan.
Trezor is a solid choice. https://trezor.io
how high are the fees on coinbase these days?
If you want low fees for buying and selling BTC, strike is awesome, supports more countries, and supports Bitcoin lighting which makes tx fees crazy low for sending money to other people or your other wallets. Coinbase doesn’t, so getting BTC off coinbase is expensive as you have to pay main chain fees. Those can be $1-$12 depending on the day.
BISQ is also great, self-custody, and decentralized for making trades, but more complex. Look into it if you trade regularly.
Quite low, but dont know exactly. I transfered from coinbase to revolut and then to my bank account and it cost me ~15€ for 2k€ transaction
Thanks for answering. I had 30% 2 months ago.
I suggest Mycelium https://wallet.mycelium.com/
It’s the best one for anonymity, which I have found so far.
Thx, Ill check it out
Away from any bloodtos, don’t want any beef.
