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9 sats \ 4 replies \ @Signal312 OP 7h \ parent \ on: Hardware wallets - are they really necessary? bitcoin
Interesting, I haven't heard about the negatives of seed phrases in particular. Could you elaborate?
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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