POLL: At what BTC price does self-custody get scary? \ stacker news ~bitcoin

POLL: At what BTC price does self-custody get scary?

4363 sats \ 40 comments \ @Scoresby 28 Feb bitcoin

When you hold your own keys, you can fuck it up. Fucking it up starts to feel a little heavier when the price goes up.

Does it make you nervous knowing that you are responsible for your wealth?

NOTE 1: Scary doesn't mean bad. Growing up can be scary. Personal responsibility is scary.

NOTE 2: If holding your wealth at a bank or a brokerage doesn't scare you at least as much, you are a sheep.

NOTE 3: I like horror movies.

$10,000 per coin8.9%

$100,000 per coin11.1%

$1,000,000 per coin36.7%

$10,000,000 per coin10.0%

Also enjoy scary movies33.3%

90 votes \ poll ended

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1925 sats \ 2 replies \ @DarthCoin 28 Feb

I would recommend to all noobs to read and pay attention to this guide I wrote long time ago:

₿itcoin - Be your own bank, think like a bank

Thinking like a bank is a very important aspect of how you organize your stash and I explain it in steps in that guide and many others.

Does it make you nervous knowing that you are responsible for your wealth?

Bitcoin comes with a great self-responsibility. You fuck up = you pay. It's your OWN fault because you did not educate yourself.

We all want to be sovereign but being sovereign imply to be responsible for your own actions. And this is the point where many normies fail: they do not want to be responsible. And that's why they will get what they fucking deserve - SLAVERY.

90 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 28 Feb

This is a pretty good guide. You nail the important stuff.

41 sats \ 0 replies \ @Taft 28 Feb

I love this quote.

Yep, Freedom is responsibility!

358 sats \ 3 replies \ @BXL909 28 Feb

For me, the question should be reversed.... at what price does non-custodial BTC get scary. I don't mind having a bit of loose change in my Wallet of Satoshi, but self-custody regardless of price for anything more than that.

102 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 28 Feb

It's interesting how bitcoin changes how you think. I think a lot of non bitcoiners feel nervous when they have a couple thousand dollars of cash in their hands, but don't seem to fret at all if all their wealth in the world I'd held at a bank that they know doesn't have it. Even in the face of bank failures. It will be very interesting to see how the self custody mindset changes society.

21 sats \ 1 reply \ @SpaceHodler 29 Feb

Non-custodial and self-custodial mean the same thing.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @BXL909 29 Feb

Good point. The terms always confuse me, but I think you know what I meant. Somebody always has custody, even if it’s yourself, so non-custodial always throws me.

277 sats \ 0 replies \ @chairman_pretense 28 Feb

I feel like your brain just readjusts the baseline. I remember moving my first few sats to cold storage and breaking out in a sweat.

Which is why it's important to get a handle on it early. You see stories of "hodlers" with massive stacks they've held on exchanges for far too long petrified to move them as they've never actually constructed or signed a btc transaction before. Or held their own keys.

223 sats \ 1 reply \ @Wumbo 28 Feb

I would recommended a non of the above option in the poll.

23 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 28 Feb

Good point.

199 sats \ 0 replies \ @030e0dca83 28 Feb

The greatness of a person is determined by the problems he doesn't give a fork about

I'm sure they're people who will never be nervous at any price

128 sats \ 0 replies \ @JesseJames 29 Feb

Good question. Not sure I would be able to trust Fidelity or the likes when it pertains to your real money. That was the reason we escaped that mess in the first place, but it does pose a question: What do you do when the price gets "up there" and you keep adding it as you DCA. At some point, you will stare at Millions on your phone, if that doesn't scare you I don't know what will....lol. On the flip side, it is a team effort, you can't do it alone, get Family involved or someone who you trust with your life and start there. Get all players educated and agree on a plan. Multiple wallets, multisigs, etc. store keys in a system you trust. (24 or 12 locations?) :-) Have fun this is just getting started....

97 sats \ 0 replies \ @Coinsreporter 29 Feb

Nothing really scares if you don't buil castles in the air. TBH, Self custody of my Bitcoin scared me initially. But as the time passes, I always followed a simple rule of 'Not putting all eggs in one basket'. I use both hardware and mobile wallets for self custody. Even I don't mind holding a little bit (upto 10% of my all Bitcoin) on a CEx. Yes, it absolutely brings another headache of managing passkeys etc. But for that I do have a secret diary...

97 sats \ 0 replies \ @BitcoinIsTheFuture 29 Feb

Why are we here! Self sovereignty and being your bank!

61 sats \ 2 replies \ @sime 28 Feb

$0.01

40 sats \ 1 reply \ @sime 28 Feb

It's a responsibility.

31 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 28 Feb

I'm forgetting who, but someone was going around calling bitcoin "responsibility go up" technology.

81 sats \ 2 replies \ @RoundaboutStacker 28 Feb

Its scariest when you have a multisig and multi-location with duplication and full blown security and backups, all while only having only a few sats in the UTXO. This is for those who know what a sat will be worth in the next 20 years.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 28 Feb

I disagree. Multisig is amazing! I definitely am more confident because there are multiple keys spread out. Just makes it a pain to spend.

51 sats \ 0 replies \ @RoundaboutStacker 29 Feb

Yep, agreed, multisig is amazing. I think I tried too hard to make a good comment. I wanted to say that having a good setup is awesome, having too few sats is scary. You can never have enough sats! And, the harder it is to spend, the more likely you are to hodl, all in all a good thing.

50 sats \ 1 reply \ @Atreus 28 Feb

Any amount of Bitcoin increases in value indefinitely ⚡️ , such that carelessly losing even a single sat is a net loss that—like the energizer bunny 🐇—grows and grows and grows.

Don't believe me? Think about the OGs. Here's Satoshi casually referencing the bros throwing tens of thousands of bitcoin away just over a decade ago:

Any of you early adopters who generated tens of thousands of coins back in the early days, are you willing to send a few to the Faucet to be given away so more people can try out Bitcoin? I know that most of them are likely to be lost (I suspect there a lot of slashdot lookey-loos who won’t stickaround long enough to spend their 5 bitcoins), but if that’s the case then that’ll just increase the value of your other bitcoins, anyway...

This doesn't, of course, mean not to trade your sats, but to recognize that the whole network is valuable (“property in cyberspace”) because it's the first and only absolute scarcity.

As far as the poll, "What level of buying power causes pain..." well, that's classified 😊

21 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 28 Feb

I think about this a lot in the various instances where I've left a few sats stuck in a wallet. Newbie mistakes before I had learned very much about bitcoin. If everybody loses a few SATs here and there that really will add up. And it's a number that only can go up. Kind of eerie to think about. Will there be some future where there are only a couple trillion sats left?

40 sats \ 1 reply \ @Taft 28 Feb

When you hold your own keys, you can fuck it up. Fucking it up starts to feel a little heavier when the price goes up. Does it make you nervous knowing that you are responsible for your wealth?

Why you should feel "a little heavier when the price goes up" since you hold your own keys? If one is wise enough to secure very well the keys, why should one be worried or nervous about this?

P.S. These are friendly questions. Just asking myself aloud here! 😊😊

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 28 Feb

Fair point. If I had been lucky enough to mine bitcoin in 2010, I could see spending 10k bitcoin on pizza and thinking nothing of it. Same for keeping several thousand on a thumb drive. But when more people use it and the network itself becomes more valuable, it starts to mean a little more. You think more seriously about what you are doing with it. I'm curious when that point happens for different people.

34 sats \ 0 replies \ @KLT 29 Feb

With great power, comes great responsibility. I humbly accept.

34 sats \ 0 replies \ @f6287b82CC84bcbd 29 Feb

1 btc = 1 btc

the real price is infinity divided by 21000000

34 sats \ 0 replies \ @BlokchainB 29 Feb

I don’t fear screwing up anything I fear getting robbed or burglarized

51 sats \ 2 replies \ @Natalia 29 Feb

Does it make you nervous knowing that you are responsible for your wealth?

at first, yes, but after more practice ( learning how to make cold wallet and restore it ) so freeing! and it trained me how to be MORE responsible because I'm the one to blame if anything happened; This way of thinking spread to other things in my life, so now I take different things slowly back into my own hands.

137 sats \ 1 reply \ @Scoresby OP 29 Feb

I've experienced a similar trend towards personal responsibility since learning about bitcoin. I'm curious, what other things you've felt self-custody thinking spread to?

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Natalia 29 Feb

food - buying from local farmers instead of supermarket
clothes - finding natural fabric and tailors to make my own instead of ordering from brands
other daily products, from hairbrush, shoes to skincare, all made by the people I trust

Basically, I look at what I really need and then I take my time to craft them instead of just ordering whatever is available online. 👀

51 sats \ 1 reply \ @TheBTCManual 29 Feb

Depends on a bunch of factors if you're reasonably technically sound, maybe the relative purchasing power isn't much of a factor, but then it can become more of a social problem.

For example, let's say you have 1 BTC and you're in a country like mine where 100k puts you in the top 10% of wealth or close to it, you become a walking ATM. Home invasions are the norm and there's no chance of police services or the government coming to save you, you're on your own.

I guess you can distribute your coins/keys but that might secure your funds, but not your safety or your life..I've had 2 friends murdered for way less, so you need to factor in how much your life is worth in a way.

The other option is to trim your position and either increase your home safety, add private security, or move to an area that might see a lower chance of attack, better rule of law/enforcement, and that adds to your cost of self-custody indirectly

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 29 Feb

Moving sounds like the best option there.

I was kinda surprised by how often buglary, violence came up in response to this question. I still have the feeling that most of the population doesn't pay attention to bitcoin. As in they wouldn't know how to use a hardware wallet. However, the very real threat of burglars makes me realize something: criminals are always cutting edge.

Hope you find somewhere (or someway) safe to live.

34 sats \ 1 reply \ @decentmoney2009 29 Feb

Different for everyone, but a general rule would be when your Bitcoin stash is the majority of your total wealth.

If you fuck up, it's going to hurt.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 29 Feb

Exactly, as bitcoin becomes a bigger part of your life the cost of a fuck up gets way more serious.

I often think about this while driving a car. The cost of a fuck up while driving can also be catastrophic. And you have to trust all the other maniacs out there not to fuck up. Yet, lots of people drive (and lots of people get fucked up because of driving).

34 sats \ 1 reply \ @clownworld 29 Feb

It’s not too hard to do it right.

Use a hardware wallet and choose a hard long PIN for it.
Save your seed in a steel backup device.
Save your seed phrase in multiple safe locations.
Use a passphrase on top of your seed words that only you know and that is never written down.
When you travel internationally, wipe your hardware wallet and recover it after arriving. Bring your steel seed backup and a paper backup. If anyone takes your backup, you are still protected by the passphrase. You can simply move everything to a new wallet when you get a chance.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 29 Feb

Traveling internationally with a significant amount of bitcoin is definitely scary. Actually, I should rephrase that: crossing international borders is scary. If you don't have to bring key material, don't.

34 sats \ 1 reply \ @BlueSlime 29 Feb

The scariness is overblown IMO. You just have to remember 12-24 words, or some obscure phrase, and you can convert that into an infinite number of keys.

What can be scary is someone stealing your coins. A good hardware device and proper backup removes this threat 99%. You can protect millions in wealth and should be okay.

When you get to the point of having a trust or corporate treasury, then you may need a basic multi-sig with key rotation, or a vault.

When you have enough wealth that state actors want to give you the gadaffi special, then you should use a vault controlled by a federation of signers.

What is surprising to me is that the user experience for vaults and multi-sig watch towers are still not great.

300 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 29 Feb

Multisig is so close to being easy to use. I've been meaning to spend a bit of time looming into Nunchuck, maybe this gets me moving.

Sparrow already does an okay job with the multisig user experience and blue wallet has that functionality (although I haven't used it in a while).

Psbts are incredible. Multisig will be the standard for any kind of cold storage before long.

34 sats \ 1 reply \ @gojira9000 29 Feb freebie

I'm not scared about my ability to hold my Bitcoin, I'm just worried about someone else taking it from me (or perhaps losing it in some disaster scenario.)

I tried to picture what it would be like to have this BTC stack when it's worth hundreds of thousands per coin (or more) and know there are at least a few people out there who are aware that I own Bitcoin or maybe heard me talk about it in the past, and I realized my security needs to be a lot better. So I'm going multi-sig with a passphrase, decoy wallet, all that stuff, and really thinking creatively about how I want to store my backups.

I'm hoping that I can just live a normal life as the person who never seems to worry about money and not have to reveal why that is. I have a good-paying job and I'm somewhat known as a personal finance nerd so it's plausible that I might retire early.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scoresby OP 29 Feb

Among all the things that people have said here, seems like having people know you are a bitcoin "enthusiast" is the one most are worried about. Makes me think I probably shouldn't wear that giant fuzzy orange bitcoin man costume as much as I do.