I would say the exact opposite. If an attacker steals a hardware wallet, they get nothing unless they attack you again to discover your PIN code or the location of your seed phrase, so the incentive is there for a further attack since they know you have funds they cannot access. If an attacker steals a seed phrase, they can immediately steal the decoy funds you have left on that seed phrase and are none the wiser that the same seed phrase is also part of a multi-sig wallet. If they were to attack you again, there is no guarantee that you have any other funds to hand over, so there is far less incentive for a second attack.

The risk of this is lack of redundancy and your storage location begin a single point of failure. If your single storage location is destroyed, then you lose everything.

Your private keys. A private key is any number between 1 and 115792089237316195423570985008687907852837564279074904382605163141518161494336. Each private key corresponds to an address on the blockchain which bitcoin can be sent to. The bitcoin itself never leaves the blockchain. When you want to spend bitcoin from an address, you use your private key to create a digital signature to prove to everyone else that you own the bitcoin at that specific address and are allowed to spend it. You need your wallet to store these private keys and to create and sign the transactions necessary to move bitcoin around.

There's a good article about this here: https://www.ledger.com/back-to-basics-part-1where-are-my-coins

Transactions down to 3 sats/vbyte are currently being processed. The entire mempool is only around 3 vMB, so a couple of lucky block times and you'll be included within the next 20-30 minutes. Even with unlucky block times you should still be confirmed at 1 sat/vbyte within the next few hours.

It will be faster and cheaper for you to perform an RBF if your transaction is opted in, or a CPFP if you have a change output, than it will be to find a miner willing to mine your transaction and make another transaction paying them an additional fee. Can you post the transaction ID as Loyce has asked? If not, look the transaction up here - https://mempool.space/ - and tell us if has a green "RBF" tag beside features, or if it has any outputs back to an address you own.

There is nothing stopping you from using each of your 5 multi-sig seed phrases on their own to generate 5 separate single-sig wallets and loading each of them up with a decoy amount of crypto. If an attacker discovers one of your back ups and recovers it, they will take your decoy coins and be none the wiser that the same seed phrase is also part of a multi-sig set up.

It's disappointing to say the least. I also wonder how long it will take various hardware wallets to start implementing taproot, since taproot makes multi-sig a much more attractive option from both privacy and financial points of view.

This still isn't a guarantee. The Google account responsible for submitting new version nof the app to the play store could be compromised and result in a malicious app being uploaded. A Google employee could swap in their own malicious wallet app in order to steal funds. You could suffer a man in the middle attack and be redirected to malware despite clicking on the real app. Google could give the "verified" status to a malicious app by mistake.

The best way to make sure you have downloaded the real app published by ThomasV is it verify it against his public key. The only absolute guarantee you are installing what you think you are is to manually review all the code and build it yourself, but obviously most people do not have the knowledge required to do this.

If I didn't see the username, I'd say this post was written specifically to caricature the stupidity of anti-vaxxers. This is beyond parody.

Ordinarily yes, but it also depends on the context here.

If you have set up a hardware wallet, backed up your seed phrase to paper, and stored them together in the same place, then you have zero redundancy. If your seed phrase is going to be damaged, destroyed, lost, or stolen, then your hardware wallet will be too and you will lose everything. If your seed phrase was going to be stolen, then an attacker gains nothing additional from also stealing your hardware wallet. This of course all assumes the security of your storage location. If your hardware wallet is somewhere not very secure, such as in your pocket or a desk drawer, then storing your seed phrase alongside it is of course a significant additional risk.

In this case, though, the redundancy is in the 3-of-5 multisig. One or two seed phrases and hardware wallets being damaged or destroyed does not lead to loss of funds as it would in a single sig set up. As far as I can see, there is no difference to the risk of storing 5 cryptosteels separately compared with storing 5 cryptosteels separately each alongside their respective hardware wallet.

btcrecover is for bitcoin wallet password cracking. seedrecover is for unscrambling seed phrases, so is obviously the one you want. You'll need to include the argument --wallet-type ethereum since you are using an Ethereum address.

An example command for you might look like this:

You linked to a bunch of stats you didn't understand which actually supported my arguments, not yours, but nice try.

I really don't like the seed splitting method. You are reducing the security to a minimum of 80 bits (depending on which card is found by an attacker), even with a 24 word seed phrase. I know we discussed in another thread recently regarding the incentive to attack seed phrases and how feasible it would be to crack 80 bits, but thinking long term this is not necessarily an unrealistic goal, particularly for a determined attacker and particularly as bitcoin's value increases.

Depending on what you are looking to achieve, I think either a passphrase with 128 bits of security or a multi-sig set up of your choice are both superior to seed splitting, particularly once Taproot removes the financial penalty of multi-sig addresses.

This is probably overkill. Simply resetting the wallets to factory default and setting up a new seed phrase is enough to overwrite any data, and then you can still use the hardware wallet as a standars single-sig wallet or anything else you want to use it for.

Yeah, storing them alongside the cryptosteel is fine, but you definitely shouldn't be relying on only the hardware wallet due to the reasons I gave above.

They will only have access to a single seed, meaning OP's multi-sig funds will still be safe. Any theif willing to physically attack you to steal a seed phrase is going to have no issues attacking you for the information required to access your coins, regardless of whether it is stored on cryptosteels or hardware wallets.

OP, also remember that to restore your multi-sig wallet you will need all 5 master public keys. You either need to keep all five stored in your home securely, or store each of the other 4 along with each seed phrase back up.

Oh dear. You are going to have to find some new lunatics to watch on twatchute or whatever your conspiracy vlog of the month is. I already debunked this nonsense graph months ago - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5339046.msg57090153#msg57090153

So you don't want to be using the command --big-typos. This is only for if you don't know how many words and/or which words are incorrect. --big-typos 3 will swap every combination of three words in your seed phrase with every possible three word combination. This will give 12*11*10*2048*2048*2048 = 11 trillion combinations, which is about 130 days at 1 million combinations per second. Since you know the locations of your three missing words, you only need to search 2048*2048*2048 = 8.5 billion combinations, which is about 2 hours at the same rate. This is likely why your computer is crashing.

It is possible to do everything from the command line. I can build a command for you to run, but I need some more info first. Please answer all of the following:

Are you certain it is words 1-3 you are missing?
Are you certain words 4-12 are correct and in the correct order?
Are you trying to recover a legacy (addresses start with 1), nested segwit (addresses start with 3), or native segwit (addresses start with bc1) wallet?
Do you know an address from this wallet which has received or spent coins? Ideally the very first address in the wallet.

My understanding of the ColdCard boot check (and please correct me if I'm wrong), is that the checksum is verified on the secure element itself, and the secure element controls the red/green LEDs directly. Given that, could an attacker not replace some hardware which would feed a fake checksum to the secure element for verification? Or they could simply decouple the LEDs from the secure element altogether?

As bitcoin gets more valuable and more popular, I'm sure we will start to see more and more advanced attacks.

Hardware wallets can fail. It's not common, but it does happen, so if you aren't going to touch them for years, then there is a risk they won't work when you do. They are also not very durable, and will easily be destroyed by water, fire, impacts, crush, explosions, etc. If it were me, I would do away with the hardware wallets altogether and just use the cryprosteels instead. If you are using a 3 of 5 set up, then the compromise of one of your back ups should not be an issue.

The biggest issue is when you come to spend the coins again. If you recover the three required seeds on to a single computer, then that computer has all the information required to sweep your wallets and is therefore a single point of failure/compromise.

You can either set it up again with a new seed to overwrite the old one, or just reset it to factory default.

As Pmalek has said, resetting the device will simply wipe your data from it - it won't break the device. Note, however, that it does not necessarily reset it to "factory settings" or guarantee your safety. If an attacker has pre-initialized the device and set up a malicious seed phrase, then yes, resetting the device will wipe that and let you initialize it again from scratch. If, however, an attacker has been successful in swapping out some of the hardware or flashing their own malicious firmware, then resetting it will likely achieve nothing. The better thing to do is to update the device with firmware you have downloaded and verified.

dkbit98 shared a video a little while ago in this post which shows someone replacing the chip in a hardware wallet with an identical looking chip which mounts itself as external storage with malware designed to steal seed phrases. You still have to be pretty naive to fall for it (since it involves running software and entering your seed phrase), but physically inspecting the hardware is not a completely reliable method.

Yeah, you might want to try actually reading things for a change? A crazy notion, I know!

I use USB webcams with my computers when transferring QR codes. I've physically removed the built in webcam from my laptop, but I have a couple of super cheap webcams (like, $10 each) which I will plug in for the sole purpose of scanning a QR code and then immediately unplug again. I use a different webcam specific for each computer. It's a great set up that practically removes the possibility of leaking information or transferring malware between devices accidentally. If you want to be super paranoid, another nice trick I've picked up along the way is after I generate a QR code with one computer, I'll scan it with the webcam attached to that same computer and ensure that it scans and decodes to the correct information before I then scan it with the webcam attached to the second computer.

What I'd really like is a USB drive with maybe 300 bytes of memory only, so you could still transfer small transactions but too small for any crypto stealing malware. Maybe I'll build my own someday.

If you truly believe the dollar is going to fail, then your options to hedge your money are pretty much anything that isn't based on the dollar. Gold, sure. But also any other precious metal, oil or pretty much any other commodity, real estate, bitcoin, any stock or share from a company which would either be unaffected by the dollar collapsing or would make money from the dollar collapsing. Hell, even a "stable" fiat like Swiss francs. Even better, spread your wealth among multiple assets. Going all in on gold is just as stupid as going all in on bitcoin.

Sure, but there is a difference between Justin Sun doing it as a PR stunt which directly benefits himself and his trash altcoins, and a random person on Twitter sending bitcoin to Schiff's son and gaining nothing for themselves.

I don't think the concern is over how many coins you are storing on the hardware wallet, but rather, making yourself a target for attackers. Attackers who see a hardware wallet (and know what it is) don't know how many coins you are or are not storing on it, and most will assume you are using it for larger sums which would be unwise to keep on a mobile wallet. Indeed, using a hardware wallet for trivial amounts such as in the region of $50 might be more of an issue, since if you are attacked, a thief is unlikely to believe that you only have $50 worth of coins on the device and will continue to push you for more which you will not be able to provide.

I do use hardware wallets when I travel, but I don't use them in public and instead would use them to top up the mobile wallet on my phone as and when necessary, which is the wallet I will spend from in public.