Ledger is absolutely not safe because they know everything about your wallet because they have your xPub key.

Also, if you're not generating your own seed phrase, you're trusting that the one they generated for you is truly random and that they don't have a copy of it.

I avoid Ledger like the plague and never refer anyone to use that garbage spyware product.

The only hardware wallets I recommend are ColdCard, SeedSigner, and Foundation Passport. Some others are good but these are the only wallets that enable you to generate your own seed phrase in a completely air-gapped environment.

If you want the most comprehensive resource on Hardware wallets, check out this one from Athena Alpha: https://www.athena-alpha.com/crypto-wallets/compare/

Stay safe out there.

I have a lot of questions about this as well but I have concluded that there isn't a "correct" place to store them but rather correct characteristics of where you store them.

Many great spots are in this article: https://www.whatisbitcoin.com/security/store-your-seed-phrase

I also think that there are a lot of places that you can hide things in plain sight where they won't easily be forgotten and still be very difficult to discover/steal.

Here are a few examples:
- Decoy wall outlet https://a.co/d/49mWCNS.
- Coat hanger "wallet" https://a.co/d/dLOYA1S
- Decot can of Corn https://a.co/d/17xhv1t (This one is extra funny cause we often call bitcoin "corn")
- Decoy plant pot: https://a.co/d/1WhfN7u
- Decoy can of Barbasol shaving cream: https://a.co/d/4wXaoOm - this one is great for any Jurassic Park fans but it doesn't function.

I have also seen some amazing geocaching videos that give some great ideas on how to hide things right in plain sight and still be very difficult to find.

Hopefully between all of these methods, you find something that fits your particular situation.

1. You should know how to accumulate bitcoin and do it on a recurring basis. (Buy, accept, mine, etc.) https://www.whatisbitcoin.com/buy-bitcoin

2. Self Custody: If you do not control your own private keys, then you don't actually own any bitcoin. This can take some time but once you have enough sats, you should take custody of them in your own wallet.

3. Secure your seed phrase: This one is important. As soon as you self custody, you need to make sure that you are the only one who knows about your own seed phrase. You cannot trust hardware wallet manufacturers to generate it for you. You need to generate your own seed phrase 

4. Run Your Own Full Bitcoin Node: Once you have stacked a decent amount of sats, taken custody of them, and safely generated your own seed phrase, now you need to run your own full bitcoin node to increase your own privacy/security while also supporting the decentralization of bitcoin.

If you do all of these things, you should have a solid understanding of bitcoin. I think that is what we should expect from most users. For those of us who want to go deeper, we can continue learning as we dive down our own respective rabbit holes. 

Unlimited money printing leads to unlimited consumption. (Fiat)
Limited money printing leads to limited consumption. (Bitcoin)

On a bitcoin standard, the economy is likely to "shrink" because people won't piss away their bitcoin on a bunch of stupid fiat crap. That also means that people need to work less as the value of money increases.

The end result would be more meaningful and important production/consumption because people will make less and consume less. It will also result in less zombie companies producing cheap consumer garbage.

I look forward to such an efficient and stable economy.

The election won't have much impact on bitcoin itself but whoever wins will likely have an impact on whether or not we, as bitcoiners, are criminalized and face imprisonment for using bitcoin.

There's no single event that we should focus on or worry about to protect bitcoin but privacy is a human fight and we should all be doing what we can to protect ourselves from legal persecution. That may involve politics in some capacity. 

No, it's not pointless to run your own node. Running your own node gives you the option to increase your own privacy by not linking all of your addresses together via your xPub key.

The CEX knows the address that you send to but if you're connecting to public nodes via Sparrow (yellow toggle in lower right corner), then the real risk of privacy loss is that you're giving away your xPub to random servers. When you generate a brand new wallet (seed Phrase) and you only connect to your own node with that wallet, only your own node will know that those new addresses all belong to the same wallet. That's the most important reason to run your own node imho. https://www.whatisbitcoin.com/culture/reasons-to-run-a-bitcoin-node

Yes but one of the main reasons to run your own node is to not give away your xPub key to any random bitcoin node out there.

Yes. Privacy is a network and thus has a network effect. Running your own node with substantially increase your own privacy while also marginally increase the privacy of other bitcoiners. The more of us who run bitcoin and transact privately, the more privacy we all have as a network of users. https://www.whatisbitcoin.com/privacy/how-to-use-bitcoin-anonymously

Not in my experience.

Yes but I don't know as much about a desktop like this since I run mine on dedicated hardware (Raspberry Pi)

No. It's pretty light. I run a node on a Raspberry Pi and it works great. I download 1 mb block every ~10 minutes and upload that same block to other peers. It doesn't take up much bandwidth or anything.

Yes, I would suggest that you run your node via Tor.

I can't speak to this directly but running a bitcoin node on Tor is pretty easy with some of the node services like Umbrel and Start9. I use both. https://www.whatisbitcoin.com/technical/how-to-run-a-bitcoin-node

FWIW, you should always use a VPN for online browsing and protecting your basic privacy. Your data is being monetized without your knowledge or consent and you're not getting any of the money. Don't just give your online ID fingerprint away for free. Make them work for it.

Technically, DCA is not the best strategy. Lump-sum buys are better during a bull trend (which we are in atm). DCA is only best for a smaller window after bitcoin cools off from an all-time high.

Wicked Smart Bitcoin did a study on this and published the results on Twitter: https://x.com/w_s_bitcoin/status/1757102527990977011

Basically, Bitcoin increases in price so much that you miss out on it if you take the time to DCA.

If you already understand bitcoin, then smash buy/lump sum is the better strategy. If you are new to bitcoin, then a DCA is a good way to stack sats while you take the time to study bitcoin and learn more about how it fixes problems in your own life.

Earning it is the best way but if you don't have any bitcoin whatsoever, you might be able to use some of these services that enables you to earn bitcoin for completing micro tasks or earning cash back.

https://www.whatisbitcoin.com/guides/earn-free-bitcoin

You might also be able to try to do things on Upwork and Fiverr to get money to buy some bitcoin.

A standard bitcoin wallet is for receiving bitcoin on the blockchain itself while lightning is a payment layer that is for receiving payments much quicker, cheaper, and often with more privacy but it does have a bit of a learning curve. It may be best to focus on learning how on-chain payments work and then spend some time learning about payment channels and how they work.


A lightning invoice is much different than a bitcoin address because it contains a lot more information and has to meet certain requirements like an exact invoice amount.

You can send between lightning and on chain but you will have to pay the miner fee (which is low atm) and not all wallets support this.

Congrats. Welcome to "Running Bitcoin". We're glad to have you.

Next step is to get an electrum server running so your toggle on Sparrow is Blue and not green.  

This is just based off of my own personal experience but since your memory is not perfect and you are not infinite, it is best practice to just write your seed phrase down on something that will last longer than a lifetime like a stainless steel plate.

I personally use PunchPlate but there are other tools that are just as good. Here's my own method: https://www.whatisbitcoin.com/security/write-your-seed-phrase

Best of luck.

Nope. Those coins are lost and gone forever.

The best way to get people to account for the loss would be to fork the bitcoin code and convince some nodes that they hard cap of 21 million bitcoin should be increased and that would be the "compensation" for those lost coins.

To be clear, there's no way in hell to make that happen without a hard fork because none of us node runners are going to increase the hard cap limit ...ever.

Bitcoin is not an "investment" but that doesn't mean that a lot of people won't treat it as one.

Bitcoin is best used as a tool for long-term savings. It will prove to be the absolute safest place to put your money for storing value decades into the future.

Some people think that the ETF is just as good as owning bitcoin but that's not the case. We all need to be careful about is the use of the new ETFs that have convinced boomers to put their retirement money into them. Since we have no way to audit these ETFs, there's no way for us to be sure that they actually have the bitcoin in reserve so it is best to just buy some bitcoin, send it to your own wallet, make sure that your seed phrase is stamped into stainless steel, and then just wait until retirement age.

Maybe the ETFs are honest and they have all of the bitcoin that they say that they have but I trust bitcoin in my wallet a lot more than bitcoin supposedly sitting in Coinbase's wallet that is supposedly owned by the ETFs which are supposedly owned by the people who buy the ETF shares. That's too much risk for my liking which is why I tell everyone that you need to own at least something on-chain otherwise you don't own anything but a paper bitcoin IOU. 

I'm a bit of an absolutist on this but self-custody is the only thing that matters.

All we have to do to make the price of bitcoin pump is to consistently buy some bitcoin, send to your own wallet, and HODL.

If enough people do this very simple thing, the price of bitcoin will continue to increase forever.

IMHO, the easiest way for most people to do this is to just set up a DCA and withdraw to their own wallet as often as they reasonably can. I would suggest waiting til you have accumulated at least 1,000,000 sats before you make an on-chain withdrawal.   

I will see you at at $100k and beyond.

This shows just how important it is to use a VPN for all of your online browsing as well as a privacy focused browser like Brave, Mullvad, and even the Tor browser.

If you use both a VPN and a browser that blocks most cookies, your online privacy will increase substantially.

Agreed Bitcoin is truly amazing. Its objective nature means that anyone can use it for any reason. Not only is age not an issue but neither is nationality, race, gender, or your ability to prove that you have a residential address.

I have met people with next to nothing but they have bitcoin and are able to use it in any country that they are in. Anyone can accept it as payment with nothing but a browser and an internet connection. That's truly powerful.

This is exactly why I tell all of my friends and family who don't fully understand bitcoin. All they need to do is just set up a small DCA while they continue to learn. As soon as they take the orange pill and have their "ah ha" moment, then they can drop their DCA buys and smash buy as often as they have extra fiat.

I don't fully trust anyone but myself I don't need to trust bitcoin hodlers because bitcoin is for enemies. As long as someone has bitcoin on-chain, then they are contributing to Bitcoin's network effect as well as supporting the price floor.

All I need to focus on is stacking as many sats as I possibly can and helping my loved ones do the same. If I am even remotely successful, it's only a matter of time before an intolerant minority of us bitcoin users all gain immense amounts of freedom and sovereignty.

I am trying to avoid the noise like the ETF and just focusing on stacking and living my best life until bitcoin pushes its way into every news headline in the world again.

As much I might like to believe what Trump says, he is just saying what people want to hear. Every word he uttered in his speech last week was him reading directly off of a teleprompter.

Bitcoin exists to make politicians obsolete but if Trump is serious, there's nothing bad that will come from bitcoin getting more exposure with GenX and boomers (Trump's largest demographic).

Only time will tell. 

Just start to buy as soon as possible with a DCA purchase while you continue to learn. Once you come to the conclusion that the world at large needs bitcoin, the next natural step is to smash buy with some larger lump-sum purchases.