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This write up is very interesting to me for one main reason. It underscores how incredibly important it is for anyone dealing in this stuff to do the following…

This write up is very interesting to me for one main reason. It underscores how incredibly important it is for anyone dealing in this stuff to do the following… Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut. Pseudo-anonymity, with the emphasis on the pseudo part, is only as good as you. If you truly believe in Bitcoin and all that implies, it really is in your best interest to be quiet and keep it to yourself, and this knife cuts in more ways than you might expect. You don’t have layers of security like at a traditional bank. You are the weakest link wrt private keys and storage. Also, even talking about it amongst folks you think are your friends, like fellow Bitcoin users, isn’t wise either. Hypothetically, if you became exceedingly wealthy on paper, it would be in the interest of others to take you out of the equation so you can’t cash out. If that means a five dollar (or whatever they cost these days) wrench to the head so you stop moving… now that value is locked up in the blockchain! Could this happen to any given bitcoin users with just a few satoshi or whatnot? Very unlikely, but don’t forget that a decade and a half ago, a handful of bitcoins could cost you very little money. Now it has gone up exponentially in value and would make you a big fat target. There are those on /r/bitcoin that think a wrench won’t ever break their wills and spirits. That math is invincible. Don’t think they’ve ever been on the wrong side of one before. Math might be bulletproof, but wetware is very fragile.

jsheard 1y ago
The tension is between needing to keep your mouth shut (for your own safety) and needing to loudly evangelize crypto at every opportunity (because its value is still mostly predicated on hype and FOMO, which must be maintained). For people to believe the narrative that buying crypto will make them rich, there has to be crypto-rich people shouting about how crypto-rich they are.
- TheAmazingRace 1y ago
  That is quite a balancing act, isn’t it?
  - throwanem 1y ago
    Not before Miami slides into the Atlantic...
    - TheAmazingRace 1y ago
      Lol
- hoseja 1y ago
  "hype and FOMO", also known as "democratic mandate"
dylan604 1y ago
> Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut. The interesting thing to me about this is watching how we've changed over the past 40 years. As a kid, it was impressed up on kids to not talk to strangers. You don't tell people where you live. You don't tell people anything more than necessary. Now, people share the most intimate details of their daily lives. People share/invite random strangers to their accounts without any concerns about who they are or what they might do. People just do not think about how the most benign of posts can be used for nefarious purposes by someone else. So we've gone from share nothing to over sharing everything.
- TheAmazingRace 1y ago
  So just another point on this… you are probably not as anonymous on the internet as you might think. You can brag about wealth in cryptocurrency. But use a handle long enough, or even across several accounts that can somehow be linked, and a fingerprint of you could be constructed. It really can be done with some forensic analysis. And I think it all boils down to the fact that some humans need to make noise about their successes so they feel validated. Much like the cryptocurrency evangelists, they probably can’t help themselves because they want to ensure they defend “the mission” even if it comes at great personal cost in the long run.
  - throwanem 1y ago
    I've recently quoted on here something about learning to spend what's in your pocket. That is a special case of the same general principle evinced here, which is that if you don't put work into maintaining a broad perspective, you lose the ability to distinguish what you're used to and what's ordinary. It's worth worrying about in the general case, too. There are subtler and much more noxious failure modes here than merely getting beaned with a Swedish nut rounder.
- ummonk 1y ago
  Ehh, changes in privacy expectations have gone both ways. 40 years ago people also voluntarily listed their home address and telephone number in phone books that would be mailed to the whole community.
throwanem 1y ago
> Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut. With events like the recent Coinbase breach, is this even enough?
- TheAmazingRace 1y ago
  Nobody has to use Coinbase. That said, yes you aren’t wrong. The more intermediaries you deal with, the higher your exposure risk.
  - throwanem 1y ago
    That, and there's zero backward or forward secrecy by design. Avoiding intermediaries can't ameliorate the hazards of the protocol.
    - TheAmazingRace 1y ago
      Exactly. Hence why I don’t advocate for any cryptocurrency at all, personally. It’s fraught with peril and the juice really isn’t worth the squeeze to me. Others may have a different calculus, but I’d rather not be looking over my shoulder constantly.
      - throwanem 1y ago
        Oh, same, I've never touched the stuff. That was pure intuition 15 years ago; these days I think of it as a longterm investment paying major dividends in peace of mind. Of course it would be easy to say one's never touched crypto, and not so easy to prove, as with any negative. I don't care. If I ever get bounced with a King Dick, it'll far more likely be because I said something someone didn't like - which seems to happen about as often as I open my mouth, these days. Or because I said something someone failed to comprehend and so took insult at. Brains are severely out of fashion this decade, and I can't seem to help having some, so presumably someone will seek to scatter them sooner or later. Why not? I hear it's the last argument of kings, and their time too seems coming 'round again. In any case they better not let me hear them coming. Wiser to spin the block in a car, really. I've never been hit with a wrench before, but it did once take more than a hammer to get me off my feet.
hibikir 1y ago
This kind of works, until you have a medical issue that impairs your brain enough,an event that loses hardware keys or backups, or you care about possible inheritors when you die. Everything you do to keep keys safe from some risks weakens your posture against other risks. Making sure most people don't know about your holdings is nice and all, but ultimately key management is a really hard problem. It's hard enough for companies, but I'd argue it's even worse for individuals.
- TheAmazingRace 1y ago
  You are correct about key management being hard. I’ve been telling folks that absolutely insist on getting into Bitcoin that it’s best to leave out any notions of convenience at all, as convenience is the enemy of security. If you absolutely must have the stuff, stick to a cold wallet using pen and paper. It still has its own downsides, but it’s arguably one of the most simple ways to handle the keys problem.
  - XorNot 1y ago
    Except that's irrelevant. Key management doesn't mitigate the threat against you. If the person who kidnaps you believes you have the necessary keys on you, or remember them or whatever, they aren't going to let you go because you genuinely do not have the ability to provide them.
    - TheAmazingRace 1y ago
      I fully agree with this sentiment. The burden of proof rests upon the kidnapped person to present the cryptocurrency or say it was “lost in a boating accident” but good luck proving a negative, in which case, you’re probably dead.
      - quesera 1y ago
        ... and you don't even have the option of coughing up the keys to save your life.
  - 1y ago
busyant 1y ago
> Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut. Matt Levine had a recent article about this. Another part of the problem is that some BTC repositories* got hacked and the hackers got people's names and addresses and maybe quantity of BTC So, even if you keep your mouth shut, if people can get your address, you're a potential target. *(I can't recall the details and I don't know enough about crypto to know if I'm using the proper terminology) * edit: here's the article. skip down to "$5 wrench attack" https://archive.is/lUNox https://archive.is/lUNox
PicassoCTs 1y ago
You know, there are people here who have a living memory growing up in a high trust society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_societies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_socie... And i refuse to accept all this advice, all this barbed wire as normal and all these grifters and gangsters as socially acceptable. And i refuse the victim reversal, of the "stupid" victim calling for it. No, all those trying to normalize the wild-west and those who try to prosper from the wild west- they have to go. Now. Wherever they came from. Take your low-thrust, non-working societies with you. The enablers too, if you want to co-exist with this, you are wrong here. You need to go. Now.
- tmnvix 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - dotancohen 1y ago
    Nobody mentioned immigrants. Society exists online as well as in cities.
  - PicassoCTs 1y ago
    No, there are immigrants who want to dwell in high trust societies and contribute to that. Who are welcome! If you want this and want to participate in it - you are a enrichment to the world and the society you want to partake. But if you push for a lowtrust society, because these "upvalue" security providers in daily life and you think you must re-educate your fellow man away from "stupidity" towards being eternally paranoid on the lookout, you are a detriment. If you plan to actively prosper from pushing the scam parasitism and decay on "suckers" or just poisoning a high-trust society with low-trust fabrications - you are the economic equivalent to a lethal parasite or contagion.
- lazide 1y ago
  You’re just imagining a false past. Shit like this has always been going on - it’s just more visible now. The Jordan Belforts and P.T. Barnums (and many more) have been a part of US society since the beginning.
robocat 1y ago
> Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut. This leads to the outcome that it is hard to find good security advice. I'm from New Zealand and too many in the crypto community here are far too trusting (unsafely so - so why would I wish to learn from them). I was (past tense) interested in investing in crypto however I wanted to learn how to manage security before I invested more than I could afford to lose (say more than a month's salary). I have never felt I could trust my own security so I have never invested much in crypto (one exception has been a little money in crypto correlated stocks). I was in South America and I thought that might be a good place to learn crypto security since the people there need to be a lot more careful about their security. I couldn't find anybody I trusted to teach me, even if offering a good professional hourly rate. Easy to find people with opinions on security: however they were somewhat ignorant because they lacked real risk (because their amounts at risk were small enough that they would never be spear targeted). When basic security is silence, then it is difficult to find anyone clueful who would teach. Edit: an interesting adventure in trying to understand trust. Smart people won't share the details of their own security because it puts their security at risk (how can they trust me?) And why would I trust anybody who isn't at risk?
- TheAmazingRace 1y ago
  It really is a tough row to hoe. This sort of Wild West commerce with cryptocurrency is what the community at large wanted, and now with that lack of trust… that extends to everything here. It’s truly exhausting in the long run, which is why I prefer old fashioned, tried and true financial vehicles instead.
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago
  > And why would I trust anybody who isn't at risk? Because they are very knowledgeable.
  - lazide 1y ago
    Knowledge which has never been (credibly) tested, or for which there is little at stake for the person expounding it if they are wrong is unwise to trust.
lottin 1y ago
> Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut. A critical aspect of crypto-currencies is sales. They have to sell a story so that investors keep pouring money into the system. Otherwise the whole thing would collapse very quickly.
daveguy 1y ago
Or just don't mess with bitcoin and other crypto. It's pretty easy to avoid.
MrScruff 1y ago
I have a few friends who've done well out of crypto, and they seem to struggle to follow your advice. I think the success they have with it also gives them a false sense of confidence, like they know what they're doing, rather than bzzzzzt number goes up. One of them was defrauded of their entire savings, and only discovered at the point where they needed it as a deposit on a house. The person had spent over a year worming their way into their confidence (not just online), and was regarded as a good friend. They managed to convince them over a long period of time that it was safer for them (as a financial advisor) to manage their funds for them. Once the wallet was out of her control, the 'friend' disappeared entirely.

jsheard 1y ago

The tension is between needing to keep your mouth shut (for your own safety) and needing to loudly evangelize crypto at every opportunity (because its value is still mostly predicated on hype and FOMO, which must be maintained). For people to believe the narrative that buying crypto will make them rich, there has to be crypto-rich people shouting about how crypto-rich they are.

TheAmazingRace 1y ago
That is quite a balancing act, isn’t it?
- throwanem 1y ago
  Not before Miami slides into the Atlantic...
  - TheAmazingRace 1y ago
    Lol
hoseja 1y ago
"hype and FOMO", also known as "democratic mandate"

dylan604 1y ago

> Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut. The interesting thing to me about this is watching how we've changed over the past 40 years. As a kid, it was impressed up on kids to not talk to strangers. You don't tell people where you live. You don't tell people anything more than necessary. Now, people share the most intimate details of their daily lives. People share/invite random strangers to their accounts without any concerns about who they are or what they might do. People just do not think about how the most benign of posts can be used for nefarious purposes by someone else. So we've gone from share nothing to over sharing everything.

TheAmazingRace 1y ago
So just another point on this… you are probably not as anonymous on the internet as you might think. You can brag about wealth in cryptocurrency. But use a handle long enough, or even across several accounts that can somehow be linked, and a fingerprint of you could be constructed. It really can be done with some forensic analysis. And I think it all boils down to the fact that some humans need to make noise about their successes so they feel validated. Much like the cryptocurrency evangelists, they probably can’t help themselves because they want to ensure they defend “the mission” even if it comes at great personal cost in the long run.
- throwanem 1y ago
  I've recently quoted on here something about learning to spend what's in your pocket. That is a special case of the same general principle evinced here, which is that if you don't put work into maintaining a broad perspective, you lose the ability to distinguish what you're used to and what's ordinary. It's worth worrying about in the general case, too. There are subtler and much more noxious failure modes here than merely getting beaned with a Swedish nut rounder.
ummonk 1y ago
Ehh, changes in privacy expectations have gone both ways. 40 years ago people also voluntarily listed their home address and telephone number in phone books that would be mailed to the whole community.

throwanem 1y ago

> Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut. With events like the recent Coinbase breach, is this even enough?

TheAmazingRace 1y ago
Nobody has to use Coinbase. That said, yes you aren’t wrong. The more intermediaries you deal with, the higher your exposure risk.
- throwanem 1y ago
  That, and there's zero backward or forward secrecy by design. Avoiding intermediaries can't ameliorate the hazards of the protocol.
  - TheAmazingRace 1y ago
    Exactly. Hence why I don’t advocate for any cryptocurrency at all, personally. It’s fraught with peril and the juice really isn’t worth the squeeze to me. Others may have a different calculus, but I’d rather not be looking over my shoulder constantly.
    - throwanem 1y ago
      Oh, same, I've never touched the stuff. That was pure intuition 15 years ago; these days I think of it as a longterm investment paying major dividends in peace of mind. Of course it would be easy to say one's never touched crypto, and not so easy to prove, as with any negative. I don't care. If I ever get bounced with a King Dick, it'll far more likely be because I said something someone didn't like - which seems to happen about as often as I open my mouth, these days. Or because I said something someone failed to comprehend and so took insult at. Brains are severely out of fashion this decade, and I can't seem to help having some, so presumably someone will seek to scatter them sooner or later. Why not? I hear it's the last argument of kings, and their time too seems coming 'round again. In any case they better not let me hear them coming. Wiser to spin the block in a car, really. I've never been hit with a wrench before, but it did once take more than a hammer to get me off my feet.

hibikir 1y ago

This kind of works, until you have a medical issue that impairs your brain enough,an event that loses hardware keys or backups, or you care about possible inheritors when you die. Everything you do to keep keys safe from some risks weakens your posture against other risks. Making sure most people don't know about your holdings is nice and all, but ultimately key management is a really hard problem. It's hard enough for companies, but I'd argue it's even worse for individuals.

TheAmazingRace 1y ago
You are correct about key management being hard. I’ve been telling folks that absolutely insist on getting into Bitcoin that it’s best to leave out any notions of convenience at all, as convenience is the enemy of security. If you absolutely must have the stuff, stick to a cold wallet using pen and paper. It still has its own downsides, but it’s arguably one of the most simple ways to handle the keys problem.
- XorNot 1y ago
  Except that's irrelevant. Key management doesn't mitigate the threat against you. If the person who kidnaps you believes you have the necessary keys on you, or remember them or whatever, they aren't going to let you go because you genuinely do not have the ability to provide them.
  - TheAmazingRace 1y ago
    I fully agree with this sentiment. The burden of proof rests upon the kidnapped person to present the cryptocurrency or say it was “lost in a boating accident” but good luck proving a negative, in which case, you’re probably dead.
    - quesera 1y ago
      ... and you don't even have the option of coughing up the keys to save your life.
- 1y ago

busyant 1y ago

> Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut. Matt Levine had a recent article about this. Another part of the problem is that some BTC repositories* got hacked and the hackers got people's names and addresses and maybe quantity of BTC So, even if you keep your mouth shut, if people can get your address, you're a potential target. *(I can't recall the details and I don't know enough about crypto to know if I'm using the proper terminology) * edit: here's the article. skip down to "$5 wrench attack" https://archive.is/lUNox https://archive.is/lUNox

PicassoCTs 1y ago

You know, there are people here who have a living memory growing up in a high trust society. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_societies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-trust_and_low-trust_socie... And i refuse to accept all this advice, all this barbed wire as normal and all these grifters and gangsters as socially acceptable. And i refuse the victim reversal, of the "stupid" victim calling for it. No, all those trying to normalize the wild-west and those who try to prosper from the wild west- they have to go. Now. Wherever they came from. Take your low-thrust, non-working societies with you. The enablers too, if you want to co-exist with this, you are wrong here. You need to go. Now.

tmnvix 1y ago
[flagged]
- dotancohen 1y ago
  Nobody mentioned immigrants. Society exists online as well as in cities.
- PicassoCTs 1y ago
  No, there are immigrants who want to dwell in high trust societies and contribute to that. Who are welcome! If you want this and want to participate in it - you are a enrichment to the world and the society you want to partake. But if you push for a lowtrust society, because these "upvalue" security providers in daily life and you think you must re-educate your fellow man away from "stupidity" towards being eternally paranoid on the lookout, you are a detriment. If you plan to actively prosper from pushing the scam parasitism and decay on "suckers" or just poisoning a high-trust society with low-trust fabrications - you are the economic equivalent to a lethal parasite or contagion.
lazide 1y ago
You’re just imagining a false past. Shit like this has always been going on - it’s just more visible now. The Jordan Belforts and P.T. Barnums (and many more) have been a part of US society since the beginning.

robocat 1y ago

> Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut. This leads to the outcome that it is hard to find good security advice. I'm from New Zealand and too many in the crypto community here are far too trusting (unsafely so - so why would I wish to learn from them). I was (past tense) interested in investing in crypto however I wanted to learn how to manage security before I invested more than I could afford to lose (say more than a month's salary). I have never felt I could trust my own security so I have never invested much in crypto (one exception has been a little money in crypto correlated stocks). I was in South America and I thought that might be a good place to learn crypto security since the people there need to be a lot more careful about their security. I couldn't find anybody I trusted to teach me, even if offering a good professional hourly rate. Easy to find people with opinions on security: however they were somewhat ignorant because they lacked real risk (because their amounts at risk were small enough that they would never be spear targeted). When basic security is silence, then it is difficult to find anyone clueful who would teach. Edit: an interesting adventure in trying to understand trust. Smart people won't share the details of their own security because it puts their security at risk (how can they trust me?) And why would I trust anybody who isn't at risk?

TheAmazingRace 1y ago
It really is a tough row to hoe. This sort of Wild West commerce with cryptocurrency is what the community at large wanted, and now with that lack of trust… that extends to everything here. It’s truly exhausting in the long run, which is why I prefer old fashioned, tried and true financial vehicles instead.
aleph_minus_one 1y ago
> And why would I trust anybody who isn't at risk? Because they are very knowledgeable.
- lazide 1y ago
  Knowledge which has never been (credibly) tested, or for which there is little at stake for the person expounding it if they are wrong is unwise to trust.

lottin 1y ago

> Keep. Your. Mouth. Shut. A critical aspect of crypto-currencies is sales. They have to sell a story so that investors keep pouring money into the system. Otherwise the whole thing would collapse very quickly.

daveguy 1y ago

Or just don't mess with bitcoin and other crypto. It's pretty easy to avoid.

MrScruff 1y ago

I have a few friends who've done well out of crypto, and they seem to struggle to follow your advice. I think the success they have with it also gives them a false sense of confidence, like they know what they're doing, rather than bzzzzzt number goes up. One of them was defrauded of their entire savings, and only discovered at the point where they needed it as a deposit on a house. The person had spent over a year worming their way into their confidence (not just online), and was regarded as a good friend. They managed to convince them over a long period of time that it was safer for them (as a financial advisor) to manage their funds for them. Once the wallet was out of her control, the 'friend' disappeared entirely.