Bitcoin Forum

I was thinking just how much resources and attention to detail the brokers of whale investors, get to give and dedicate to an investors account inorder not to loose the millions of cash in their care. Same also applies to those of us who would prefer to DCA on our own without the help or services of a crypto broker.

If a whale investor has done well to DCA Bitcoins and have accumulated enough for a while now, and is trying to keep such enormous amount of Bitcoin safe from hackers or scammers, is one of the best ways not to just rotate the DCA holdings annually or periodically between safer wallets, to keep it safe?
Does such kind of rotation of holdings guarantee it's safe from hackers or scammers?

It is less about the address itself, and more about the precautions taken through how the coins are being stored. For anyone holding a significant amount in the long term, it should be a no brainer to use cold storage as opposed to wallets that are connected to a server or have access to the internet. A paper private key/seed, pk/seed on an encrypted external device or hardware wallets are probably the first options that could serve to be safe enough.

The step before a safe wallet however, is a safe system. Windows vs. Linux, Linux. A new account or system that is not a daily driver, one that is known to be safe. Next. The network level. Knowing that the network is free from vulnerability is another, more complex precaution to take.

Checking these three boxes will limit vulnerabilities down to the end user. No mistakes, no loss. Quite a few community members and myself have been discussing and voting for the topic to be added to a separate board to help with improving security and privacy in the Meta board. I recommend those and others interested in the topic to check out the discussion here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5434404.msg61581530#msg61581530) and if interested in voting, visiting the community vote here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5462155.msg62650130#msg62650130).

Rotating the wallet may improve privacy, or provide a level of protection in a world where bruteforcing actually becomes possible (not really a problem at the moment). Ultimately it is superseded by the precautions listed above.

The other kind of security is physical. Ensuring that the wallet can't be breached offline, or has offline risk, is also an important thing to consider.

I am not sure what rotation means. Whales are not careless like us. They know very well how they should secure their funds. It's important for every crypto user to secure funds in a safe wallet. It doesn't matter if the crypto is accumulated by the dollar-cost averaging (DCA) strategy or any other way. It doesn't make any difference when the question is: secure your funds. Just accumulate and move the funds into a cold wallet. This isn't a hard task nowadays, even for small investors like me. A hardware wallet doesn't cost much compared to how it secures your funds.

If I'm not wrong, I believe the OP means moving from one wallet/address to another periodically.

Moving your coin from one wallet to another periodically will just affect your privacy because when you’re were DCAing there is high chance that it was done on different addresses and by moving them to another wallet you’re actually consolidating them, now a move done periodically will only raise alarm to hackers since everything can be seen publicly.

The first point of security is having a cold wallet either by buying a hardware wallet or if you have the knowledge by setting it up your self on airgapped device this will actually reduce the scammers online getting access to your wallet keys or seeds. The seeds which should be stored totally offline is one area where I will advise the use of a multi sig wallet, this way you back the seeds properly and at different locations as such if one of the seeds gets exposed the scammer wouldn’t be able to spend from it.

You can set up the a 2-of-3 multi sig wallet and back it up as suggested below, this way you don’t need to have two or more wallets (although in some cases is still not bad, especially if you’re using a hardware wallet and the fund is large, split it into two separate hardware wallets from two different prominent companies)

Moving your coins from one address to a different one, as far as I know, I won't help to keep your satoshis safe against hackers and scammers. And there are simple reasons for it: Scammers do not try to break into your wallet but use attack techniques which aim towards one's distraction and human flaws: social engineering, phishing, personification of oficial agents, etc. So it is not suitable to talk about scammers in this context.
Hackers will always to to get your private key, so it is not about moving your coins around periodically, it is rather about keeping them in a cold wallet, passphrases and divide the satothis in different cold wallets. So the hackers will have no chance to get their hands on your satoshis remotely.
Moving your satoshis around in a periodic way could only erode your privacy, because any paying attention to your transactions on the blockchain will eventually see the partner and identify many of your addresses and even those you may use to deposit into exchanges.

Pretty sure there are proven ways to protect yourself from hackers as a DCA-ing Whale but at the same time, rotating your assets upon multiple wallets prove to be the most consistent in giving these people more security than any other method on the market right now. Picture this, you're someone holding millions worth of bitcoins, would you really go out of your own way to venture out and find other ways to secure your crypto, all the while risking yourself getting hacked or scammed in the process?

I don't think so. In this industry, when you've become so big the only problem you have is how you're going to keep your money, sometimes the best answers are those that are already in our faces.

The holders internet activity is the one that can make him into such risk of being scammed or hacked. If we're going to take a look at the whales moving out their funds. Usually, the funds that they're moving have been held and slept to the same wallet for several years. That means to say, that there's no need to rotate the wallet that we've been using to DCA or store our Bitcoins for so long. What matters is how we're keeping them and trying to avoid any exposure to internet activities. But on this one, whatever works for you and what you think is gonna work for you then try to consider that because what might worked for those whales that have funds held on their the same wallet for a very long time might not just be the same for you.

What needs to be considered in this case is our personal situation because I still feel that it doesn't matter whether we do DCA or buy continuously for investment because ultimately the safety of our domet depends on our rigour.
As long as we are not careless about the security of the wallet we have, then indeed indirectly this can protect the portopolio that we have even though we make transactions by buying bitcoin in DCA.
The point is that it is not our buying strategy that is the problem, it is only our carelessness and negligence that we have that can invite hackers to come.

You mean moving one's asset from the old wallet to a new one? Well, the security of our wallets is in our hands. Usually, there are two kinds of wallets: cold and hot. If you have created a Bitcoin address through an air gap device and perhaps you are to use that wallet as your cold wallet, you will make sure that the wallet is not always going online until you are ready to make a transaction from the wallet. After creating the Bitcoin address and obtaining your private key, you can securely keep it safe in a place where you know it will not get destroyed, and after you do so, you can always send Bitcoin to the address even when the wallet is offline. If you kind of have a cold wallet and are very sure that your private keys have not been exposed or have not been compromised, then there's no need to rotate your asset from one wallet to another.

Do you mean whales that hold their crypto in centralized exchanges and centralized services, i don't know of any crypto broker whose sole duty is to help investors store their crypto, but i know they offer services like buying, selling and converting crypto to cash or to another crypto and if you decide you leave your crypto in their platform, it is at your own risk. Buying BTC etf's is another way these brokers manage your coins for you, but in all of these scenarios, you have to trust the service; and BTC is a trustless network, so you should store your coins in your self custodial wallet without trusting third parties.
This will only give you a false sense of security, to keep your BTC's safe you have to use extra layers of security like multisig or adding a passphrase to your seed phrase, you should also use a hardware wallet or create your own airgapped wallet, but sending your funds from one wallet to another is not a method of security, except one wallet was compromised.

I don't think that the ones who follow a DCA strategy need to do something like that because the investors who accumulate a lot of Bitcoin often tend to use multiple wallet addresses to store their Bitcoin and it's not worth it for them to move their Bitcoin from one wallet to other wallet for safety purpose.

The whales or you can say high roller investors always prefer to keep their Bitcoin into multiple wallets and all of those wallets are cold wallets which never get to see internet again until the investors devices to make them online in order to convert their Bitcoin in fiat.

Even without any rotation their Bitcoin are safe from hackers and I'm pretty sure that hackers don't really focus a lot on the wallets that have low amount of Bitcoin because it will be a troublesome job for them to hack such wallets. In fact hacking of a Bitcoin wallet isn't an easy task for any level of hacker. The investors are mostly well aware about hackers and that's why they try their best to have all security measures at first before investing in Bitcoin.

I casually thought most whale movements might have been not primarily for converting of BTC to fiat but for security reasons, of which one easy solution that popped up is to periodically or annually rotate the HODLing wallet account, just to be sure to keep intruders or hackers or scammers guessing.

Cold wallets sure does the trick, but I figure it might be too easy to discover, mostly when those around know of such DCA investment and live in proximity so as they can dicipher where the key phrases or cold wallet secret location is.

If you can practice proper security measures, you will not need to move your bitcoins from one wallet to another regularly. Moving bitcoins from place to place can be as dangerous as the danger you are trying to avoid.

With any slight mistake while moving the bitcoins around, they can get lost by being sent to a wrong address etc.

"Those around?" You mean who? Who's going to reveal your identity to them as the person holding those assets? And who is also going to reveal to them where your secret phrase or private key is hidden? The reason why I said the security of your asset lies in your hands is because, if you fear that you will get hacked, you will not unless you by chance expose your secret information to a third party, or perhaps you have your Bitcoin wallet on your phone or PC, and through some unsecure sites that you normally visit, you mistakenly grant access to hackers.

When keeping your seed phrase, you don't only keep it in one place or one location; in fact, don't you know that you can keep your secret phone in 3 or 6 different locations? For example, if you have 12 secret phrases for your Bitcoin wallet, you can shear the phrases into 3 pieces, which means in one piece, you have four seed phrases; on the second piece, another four phrases; and on the last piece, you will have the remaining four phrases to sum up the total of 12 secret phrases for your wallet. You can keep those three pieces in three different locations. To access your Bitcoin wallet, you need to gather the 12 phrases from three different locations.

By so doing, you can't just get compromised because no one will know where to find all the seed phrases.

There are no attacks in Bitcoin that target a specific address or wallet. Hackers steal coins by spreading malware across the Internet, hoping that eventually it will reach a crypto holder. Or if they know an identity of a holder, they can send them an email or a message with malware or malicious link.

So it's important to protect your privacy, never interact with anything unsafe and keep your wallets isolated from the Internet.

To have safe storage for your bitcoin and same for your capital, you should never store all you have (bitcoin, capital, cash) in one place, one account, one wallet.

Storing your bitcoins in different wallets and if anything goes wrong with one wallet, one device, you will have one or more wallets to use and this method of diversifying storage can help you losing all bitcoin, all capital with a single accident, hack, compromise.

I don't think moving your bitcoin around wallets can be helpful because if your device is compromised and all information about all wallets are stored at it, it can not help.

Nothing can guarantee any safety from hackers. Whatever you do, will only increase your chance of not getting hacked. Also moving from one account to another will not guarantee anything at all.

The best you can do is to have two factor authentication enabled. Where every outgoing transaction will have to be validated by two factor authentication. That will provide you with the similar level of security like rotating accounts.

To be honest nothing can really guarantee any safety from hacker.

I agree.

Multi-sig wallet, cold storage wallet, airgap wallet can be helpful with better security and safety but nothing can guarantee 100% safety. In my post, I emphasized the importance of having different wallets on different devices and locations. To have all of devices, wallets compromised will be harder than have one device and wallet compromised.

Diversify your bitcoin in different wallet softwares and have different wallets to store your bitcoin on different devices.

This is a better idea. Do I suppose you put into consideration that the investor still maintains or observes a steady DCA strategy?
 I don't expect hackers or scammers to be able to also detect the address for funding used when fulfilling a DCA investment pledge percentage for the time, because the steady frequency of DCAing might give in, else, why use password authenticator services for security too?

If you acquire your bitcoin through an exchange or you earn it or take any procedures to make sure you have it, it's yours only if you don't use an exchange, expose your wallet security informations to the public or go to illegal sites to make illicit downloads or engage on other related activities that may be used as vulnerability to your security, such as malicious links, downloads, website, or social media groups where you can out of your own carelessness get loosed and give access to them to find a reason to attack you.

You are missing the point here, you cannot tell why someone moved their coins from one address to the other, except the person tells you the reason, you can only guess why, and you may be wrong.

Like i have already said, moving your funds from one address to another is important only if your device or wallet has been compromised, moving your funds around doesn't give you security of your funds, what you need to worry about is the device that stores your keys locally, that device must be used in a very safe enviroment. If your device is compromised, your funds would be stolen and it doesn't matter if you have sent it to > 10 different wallets in the last 10 days. For better security, add extra layers of security, like setting up a multisig wallet, extending your seed phrase with a passphrase or using your wallet in a completely airgapped device.

Depends on you actually.

If you are a whale then holding up your coins on a single wallet would really be that creating that kind of doubt or fear but if you are really that pretty sure on where you have
stored up your private key or seed phrase then i dont see the need for those kind of transfers which it isnt really that necessary as long  you are aware on where those PK's been stored
up because this would really be that your main priority.

Also, there's some possible risks that you could really be able to encounter when you are passing up those funds into new wallet.
Possible malware infection could lead to hack or you would accidentally be able to typo those wallet address and other stuff which it would
really be causing for your coins to be lost forever. So it would be better that you should really be that stay put and be idle
in regarding to this matter.

I can't really tell what you're trying to say here, I'd suggest you use something like Grammarly to check your grammar. If you're suggesting that a whale would be anxious if they only use one wallet, why would you think so? I never heard any whale that said they want to use multiple wallets (unless maybe multi-sig) to store their coins and move them regularly.

Those basically apply to almost any transaction. While it increases significantly if you make transactions regularly, you can reduce it as long as you have good security practices as mentioned above.

This will go back to the holders if what fits them well because others are not really a fan of constantly changing their wallet in order to firmly secure it. Of course, others are experienced users who know the risk and they just want to cut the hacker's progress whenever they change their wallet yearly. Because they might have some reliable sources their wallet is prone to cyber-attacks because of the amount they are currently holding. There might be some hackers out there who are using brute force just to get their seeds throughout these years.

I'm of opinion that such rotations cause more harm than safety. Have hardware wallet, keep it's seed offline and you will be fine. (While hardware wallets are safest option around, they are prone to clipboard hijacking, so one needs to careful when sending funds).

That's pretty much what I instructed in the rest of my post that was not quoted:


To address the difference in what you've said, about there being a danger in transferring. There is only a danger if there is a vulnerability. There is no inherent danger with making a Bitcoin transfer. As long as you:
- Have confirmed you're sending to the correct address
- Are using a secure system and network to conduct your transactions
- Know generally what you're doing and where you're sending to
Then there really is no risk in making transactions.

Moving from one wallet to another is a huge work to do, and if one of the wallet addresses is discovered, it can be linked back to one person who is only trying to circulate it within its wallets in cycles. When you have this much money to invest in bitcoin, you should have considered and addressed the issue of bitcoin security before proceeding with the investment. I believe whales' wallets should have the highest level of protection, and hackers will have a difficult time gaining access to such wallets in the future.

If you wanted a safety means of having your bitcoin with the use of any kind of a reputable cold storage, the try as possible to maintain a good security practice along side as well, if you don't engage in anything that can give hackers route to attack you, they can't have access to you, but the way we do handle our wallet security isn't safe enough and this alone could be frustrating not to talk of when the hacker are targeting us.

DCA HODLing is an investment strategy and it is simple, as buying Bitcoin periodically reduces the impact of the time factor on the price and thus, in the long run, you will achieve profits. You can easily set up an air-gapped wallet, save the seeds and generate a new key for each transaction without the need to reveal your private keys or return them. Use the same address to purchase if you do not care about your privacy.

There is no relationship between investment strategies and how to secure your account.

Why do you believe so, i don't believe that you have to be a whale to secure your wallet, i am not a whale but i protect my BTC's well. The tools that you can use as extra layers of security is available to everyone. You can easily set up a multisig wallet in Electrum or extend your seed phrase with a passphrase. If you have an old laptop, you can easily convert it into an airgapped device, you must not have thousands of BTC's to do this.

Whales or not whales, if a wallet is not secured properly enough, it can be exploited and when exploitation, compromise happens, you will lose all bitcoins in that wallet.

No hacker will have sympathy to steal only part of your bitcoins in one wallet. If they successfully access to a victim's wallet, they will move all bitcoins in that wallet to their own wallet. To avoid risk to be detected by the victim, they will move all bitcoins with only one Bitcoin transaction and even will use very high transaction fee rate to get a quick first confirmation.

With Bitcoin blockchain, with one confirmation, your bitcoins will belong to the hacker.

I'm not implying that; what I meant was that if an account had invested a substantial amount of money in bitcoin, they would have had very robust security in place for the wallet and would not be casual about anything that could affect the wallet. Some people are negligent with their personal finances when the amount in question is not large enough to attract attackers from stealing the money, and they keep the information of larger accounts more secure and out of reach of invaders.

As most of the people above suggest, basic security is already enough for me, even if you are a whale or non-whale. Basic knowledge of not announcing to other people who have x amount of Bitcoin and staying lowkey is the first step for being safe at all even in hack or non-hack accidents.
Second is securing your private keys (offline is better), and using a personal wallet like a hardware wallet or is already enough for me.