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143 sats \ 8 replies \ @justin_shocknet 7h \ on: Hardware wallets - are they really necessary? bitcoin
I think they're retarded, but don't talk about it much because then people expect you to lay out an alternative for them. And reality is the alternative is effort and people hate putting in effort.
They're a cash grab by their sellers, no value is created by them, just the illusion of peace of mind.
Combined with seed phrases, HWWs loose people more coin than anything else. Seed phrases are a horrible idea thats never been used in Bitcoin Core for good reason.
Phrases get lost, entered into phish sites, screen-shotted, saved in email drafts.. etc etc etc... and every HWW rely on them. Disaster.
HWW's themselves introduce new supply chain risks, dox risk, can't hide in plain sight, and each one is different enough its hard to get/provide generalized support.
Self-custody needs a lot better tooling, period. Geo-redundancy solutions with multi-layer encrypted dead-man switches, family riddles, etc...
Maybe once those tools start to drop HWW's (and seed phrases) will finally die like the ought to.
And reality is the alternative is effort and people hate putting in effort.
I don't disagree with this quote, and I know you disclaimed giving an alternative already, but given the logic you've introduced (it's hard, seed phrases are imperfect, people don't put in effort) what do you tell your cousin, right now, when he finds you at the xmas family party and asks you how to get hold of some btc?
Do you tell him not to bother until he's willing to either become a security engineer, or until the ecosystem solves custody, which they have not yet done to your satisfaction after fifteen years? So just chill till then?
Or do you pinch your nose and recommend something else?
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I have no qualms sending people to a custodian like River or an ETF depending on their goals, and do that often. I'd rather that than have them lose what they've bought. I've never recommended a HWW, I have several in a foot locker that have been given to me at conferences etc and don't think I've even unboxed any of them.
Bitcoin to me is about ending central banks and the societal issues that come from it, that's different than rampant holier than though virtue signaling about ending all financial services entirely. Self-custodial optionality is the real virtue pillar to keep things in check, and that doesn't make self-custody a must for absolutely everyone.
My goal with Lightning.Pub is to bring those custodial relationships closest to home as possible, using the velocity of means-of-exchange to incentivize that.
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Ah, cool. That's basically identical to my approach and mindset - for the Xmas cousin, River is way less risky (despite real risks, which life is full of) then the cousin fucking things up somehow.
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Interesting, I haven't heard about the negatives of seed phrases in particular. Could you elaborate?
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However many stories you've heard of people losing coin, a seed phrase was the most likely contributing factor for some of the reasons mentioned already.
The problem with seed phrases is they're meant to make self-custody easier for ignorant people but don't solve for the fact that people are ignorant:
- People screenshot them, which then they get leaked
- They write them down, either losing what they wrote down or having that get stolen
- Infinite cases of HWW's pin resets combined with lost write-downs
- Save them in unencrypted files, then get swept (phrases easily detected pattern)
- Phishing sites ask for them
- Phishing phone calls ask for them
- Other dumb shit like this:
Seed phrases, by attempting to make things quick and simple, does not force the user to be deliberate... yet storing what is potentially your life savings needs to be done very slowly and deliberately.
This being such a critical issue and now spreading into Lightning nodes has forced me to start thinking about it from a product standpoint. How does your family get your sats if you die while running a routing node? Riddles, dead-man-switches, multi-layer encryption, geo-replication... lots to consider to make this stuff mainstream and safe.
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Thanks for the write up.
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write everything down.
keep it somewhere safe.
tell someone you trust.
if you can't follow these steps or trust yourself to not fuck it up, use a custodian.
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Indeed, the problem is most people will fuck up those 3 things even if they knew to do them.
These are intuitive things to you and me, and why its so difficult to put ourselves in others shoes. It's taken years for me to look at what your otherwise good list this in way this way:
write everything down
The masses need
everything to be thoroughly defined, but also that definition can't be too long to read because they won't bother reading it.keep it somewhere safe
Needs an exhaustive list of examples of things to be safe from, and what constitutes safe in each context. +DR action plan.
tell someone you trust
Trust to do what exactly? Trust not to do? Action plan a scenario where trust is broken...
It's painful to think about how many layers of clarification are needed when zero knowledge is assumed, and then how to not turn that into a full operators manual nobody wants to look at.
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