No, not really, you can buy investment gold bars starting from 1 gram if you want to. You can buy them online, and probably also in person. I would very much doubt it would be any problem to sell them.
Most people don't like risk tough, they don't like the fact they have a couple thousand euro's worth of a physical item laying in their house (or in their safe deposit box). Burglary is something real. Most western European country's feel that the life of a burglar is worth more than the items he's stealing, so most western European country's would punish the victim if he chooses to defend his/her property using any force.

Apart from myself, i don't think anybody in my extended family owns gold, bitcoin, ETF's, shares,... They just keep their money in a bank account and get a very low interest (lower than the inflation). It's not because they cannot buy these things, it's because they're afraid of losing their money (either by a market crash, gold price fluctuation, bitcoin bear market, or getting robbed). They are so uninterested in any of these things they don't even know how they work, or where they are traded.

At least, that's how i perceive this.

Just to give one more answer: i'm living in the western EU (think France, Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany) and in my country it's super easy to buy and sell gold... It's not only legal, it's about the only thing that's untaxed (as for now). If you buy silver, you have to pay tax (unless it's valid silver coins), but for gold it's still tax free . There might be some small print about which gold or how much, but for the general buyer, i think you won't run into any troubles.

You can buy gold online and have it shipped to you, you can buy it virtually and have the seller store your gold or you can buy it in a physical shop... When you want to sell, you usually have to go trough KYC tough, but as far as i know, that's about it.

It's difficult... On the one side, being your own bank also means taking responsability. On the other side, it's true that many people lost funds because of forgotten seeds.
I would agree with Polkat: for me, the default warning should probably suffice, or maybe an opt-in setting on your hardware wallet? That way people get to chose whether upgrades can only continue upon verifying the seed phrase or if they only want a big, bold warning message?

As said in my first post, and repeated several times, btcpayserver is great... BUT... it's a seperate setup you have to do (they do have docker images). It's not resource friendly, at least it wasn't when i last set it up.
It required a full node, nbxplorer and on top of that btcpayserver... The resource requirements forced me to quit using btcpayserver when i shut down my dedicated host.

Don't get me wrong: if you want to setup a big store and you plan on accepting a couple thousand dollars in crypto each month, btcpayserver is the way to go. But if you're just testing the waters, and you might (or might not) accept one or two small payments in crypto a month, btcpayserver might not be worth the hassle...

If you're a small operation, you can always use btcpayserver hosted by a thirth party, but then you're trusting somebody else again, and it might not always be free...

I have seen other posts saying there's an integration of payment gateways in shopify. It listed bitpay... I can only say that bitpay is not wel liked in the community. Here's a small list (not mine): https://debitpay.directory/anti-bitcoin/, so if you chose a gateway instead of going non-custodial, please do your homework. Not all gateways are equal!

i helped setup wordpress with woocommerce for a friend of mine, there were tons of ready made plugins that allowed you to accept crypto. Some used a free payment gateway, some a paying gateway and others were completely non-custodial (there were some where you had to give a list of addresses that could be funded, others allowed you to import your master public key, and they derived addresses when needed).
In the end, we used btcpay untill i deinstalled my dedicated server and i no longer ran it, so i helped my friend switch to MyCryptoCheckout which was pretty easy to plug in to wordpress - woocommerce and allowed the use of a master private key.

This being said, she (my friend) received a couple of payments whilst we were still using my btcpay server, but i don't think she received any more crypto payments since switching to MyCryptoCheckout.

I'm having a really hard time not shouting out "i told you so"... When the recovery feature was introduced, this was the exact scenario i put foreward, but a lot of people still decided to trust this company. Be your own bank, don't give away your private keys (or the ability to restore your private keys) to a thirth party.
Sad, very sad...

ps: not victim blaming here... It's a sad they for those that see their wallets drained because they trusted a big company. It's not really their fault, it's the company that should have prioritized their user's security above their profit.

EDIT: even after the mail itself turned out to be phishing, i still stand by my words... Sooner or later, odds are those company's will lose your keys, either as an inside job, getting robbed physically or getting hacked, and loads op people will lose their money.

slot #: 05
BTC address: bc1q50udcgfdyqanp56m9dkcqkxy5fayjc74vw9px7

taproot isn't exactly new... I made my first taproot wallet in the middle 2023, so over 2 years ago, so it's not something that's "hot off the press". Taproot is already implemented in numerous wallets.

Sorry to hear what happened to you. There is no 100% guarantee as long as you use a desktop wallet on an online machine (well, there's never a 100% guarantee, but there are safer setups that give you better odds of keeping your hard earned btc), and i personally wouldn't use 2fa in electrum since it's fee based (and i don't like that).

Do you have an old laptop or desktop machine laying around per chance? If not, you can always buy a refurbished one, or even an rPi. If you really want security, and you don't want to use a hardware wallet, you probably could look into an airgapped setup using this old (or just cheap) hardware. Just remove the wireless card (or the drivers), don't configure any network interfaces, don't plug in your ethernet cable, install linux and try to follow the docs: https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/coldstorage.html

Using testnet for a trial is recommanded!

$109,825

I have never ever pushed or promoted any kind of crypto to my friends or family. They know i hold a limited amount of BTC, and if they have questions, i'm certainly willing to answer them. If they start to parrot misinformation, i correct them without starting an actual discussion, but that's as far as i ever take it.

If you push your friends towards invisting in BTC and in a couple of months there's a bear market and they lose 50% of their investment because they have weak hands and sell when the price drops? Who will they blame? Who will be the black sheep for the rest of their lives? Short answer: it'll be you... Let your friends and family execute their own due diligence, let them make their own choices, answer their questions in a neutral way (if they have them), and that's about it. Everything else is risking a friend or family bond in case things go south.

you are right, if you create a passphrase with that much entropy, it would be hard to crack it. You do know that if you use all characters from a common keyboard, if my calculations are correct you'd need a password that's at least 31 characters long and you'd need to be sure the RNG you used didn't have any flaws?
I was more or less talking about "common" passwords... Most people tend to make passwords that are between 8 and 12 characters long, often times not using ALL characters on their keyboards (usually a combo of lower case, upper case, numbers and a small subset of special characters). Most of these can be cracked with a couple of years if you have a (small) GPU farm.

This being said, i still would never share my seed phrase... The seed extension passphrase comes on top of the seed phrase itself. Somebody trying to bruteforce your seed phrase would have to try each combination of seed words with each combination passphrase in order to rob you. They can't "just" bruteforce your seed phrase, and then start bruteforcing your password, nope, they'd need to bruteforce the combo seed phrase + password. In case one of them gets leaked the other one should be able to protect you, but this won't be the case if you give away your seed phrase willingly.

Personally, i'd advice you not to let your seedphrase touch any machine that will ever be online. Certainly don't keep the seed phrase extension password together with the seed.

But bottom line, yes, your remark is correct. If you have a strong RNG and you create a 40 character completely random string, people won't be able to bruteforce it with a couple of GPU's in a couple of years, and the odds of getting robbed even if you would release your seed phrase into the wild are slim to none. However, even in this case, i don't see any usecase to make your seed phrase public ever... Especially if you use an online medium to generate or to store said extension password.

I wanted to chip in because i don't feel like enough emphasis has been put on the answer of this question...

If you'd extend your seed phrase with a long passphrase and share said seedphrase (minus the passphrase) online, you'd go from having a wallet that would require trillions and trillions of years using a whole server farm to bruteforce to a wallet that could be bruteforced in a couple of days/months/years by somebody who has a couple GPU's laying around.
It's not just "not adviseable", it's really "not done". It's the equivalent of securing your physical gold by laying it on a public bus seat with a "do not touch" stuck to it while you're away versus storing it in for knox.

I just wanted to elaborate on Charles-Tim's answer a bit.
The problem here is dual, and not contradicting...

If you buy a second hand hardware wallet that was NOT tampered with, it is usually possible to just wipe it and generate a new seed phrase. If you'd do this, you'd be safe.
If you buy a second hand hardware wallet that was tampered with, the RNG might be intentionally broken (or the complete system might be replaced), so it would not matter if you'd receive an unitialised wallet or a pre-initialised wallet (by the bad actor). If you re-initialised said wallet, you'd always end up with derived private keys that could also be found by the bad actor, since the botched RNG would only be able to make a certain well-known preset list of seeds/master private keys.

The problem with buying from an unreputed (or second hand) source is that you have no way of telling whether the hardware wallet you received is genuine and untampered with... Re-initialising is easy, but it would only safeguard you if the wallet you received was genuine and untampered with.

Bottom line: only buy from a reputable source, check if the package is still sealed, and even then make sure you follow procedure to check for genuine hardware/firmware (if available from the official vendor). Hardware wallets are relatively cheap (certainly vs the current FIAT price), don't risk your funds by cheaping out and buying some refurbished HW wallet, or a HW wallet from sources that are either unknown or don't have a good track record (for example, amazon). Those couple bucks you saved might end up costing you everything helt on the HW wallet.

The other posters in this thread are 100% correct... Sure, you can run a 2009-2010 era node, sure you can generate "old" addresses, but always with a random private key, so the odds of generating exactly the same key satoshi did are sooooo small that in reality those odds are ~0.

If you don't believe us, why don't you try for yourself? You don't need windows XP, you don't need to compile an old core version... You just need some machine that can run docker or podman... Just set back your system's clock, grab my docker image of bitcoin core v2.7 (this was the earliest version that wasn't gui-only...), log in to the container, start bitcoind and generate addresses... Hell, why don't you do this in a loop (setting your system's clock, starting the container and generating addresses) and generate a couple thousand... Sometimes the best way to learn is to try something for yourself  

The solution is already in the stackexchange discussion: podman... Podman can run under an unprivileged user. You can even go as far as creating multiple unprivileged users and have each user run it's own container (eventough i did not test this setup myself).

Here's some interesting reading material: https://www.cloaked.com/post/the-top-3-worst-password-manager-breaches-and-security-issues-to-date

Password managers have been hacked in the past, and i'm pretty sure others will be hacked in the future.
Even if you use a local keypass, it can theoretically be bruteforced or you can fall victim to a keylogger.

The only safe setup i can imagine right now is a keypass database with a strong password on a removable encrypted medium (maybe a usb key with hardware encryption) that's stored in a secure location and that's only plugged in on offline machines, and it's probably a good idear to copy it on a second encrypted medium for safety. Opsec-wise, i think that setup might even be safer than storing your seed on a piece of paper, as long as the offline machine you plug the thumbdrive into never ever goes online (maybe even has it's network unplugged and it's wifi physically disabled)

It is true, however, that a lot of people store really important data in those password managers, there's no denying that... I'm 100% sure that a password manager is safer than re-using your password. Storing your seed completely offline also has it's attack vectors (like an evil maid, or burglars, or losing your seed), and it's correct that an extended seed with a strong custom password is a good idear.

Those are package repo's (not github repo's), some of them are Gb's of (binary) rpm packages, sometimes even providing regular patches. I'm not sure github would approve if i cloned those into a github repo

For github repo's, you do have a valid point, i should probably fork those, so i'm not longer depending on repo's that might be removed in the future. I'll put that one on my to-do list.

update:

• a repo used for older v0.2.x versions no longer exists, but the necessary packages were moved to other repo's, i modified all impacted Dockerfiles, everything builds again
• i rebuilt all images with the latest suse BCI, so the container images have the latest patches
• i tagged v29.0 as latest, since it seems stable
• i modified the documentation using nice badges, so in the future you can look at the documentation to find of when a certain version was last built, wether the build was succesfull and how big the image is... For example: v29.0 (latest) documentation
• eventough i made dockerfiles for sles 15 sp7, it's very likely the branches will never be merged. Suse just released sles 16 BCI's, so i guess i'll probably jump to sles 16 instead of 15 sp7 (16 will have much longer support)

Sure, they can't ban crypto in itself, but they can ban about every usecase you have... Force strict KYC/AML for all vendors accepting crypto, force strict KYC/AML for each and every exchange, ban everything that has some remote link to privacy (like mixers)... They can make everything absurd if they really wanted to: "hey when we analyse the unspent output you used for a transaction to pay for this 50€ piece of hardware, and we trace 10 transactions deep, we find a transaction that might have had something to do with something illegal: your funds are now locked forever..."
Sure, you can still make a wallet, but if they strictly controll every way you spend your funds, crypto is reduced purely to p2p transactions, limiting the scope immensely.