Trust No One

[lichcoin]

thx brah

[etrader]

Well said!

[sdatrum]

Thanks for the information - I wish BTC could be a little bit more secure while still providing autonomy.

[Kitemike]

Thanks for the information - I wish BTC could be a little bit more secure while still providing autonomy.

Security is not something that you wait for someone else to provide you.  There are plenty of steps anyone can take that make theft a minimal issue.  Luv the topic! Where can I get the T-shirts?

[samuraibud]

Acctually one cannot trust even himself, because of the asociative (not digital) way our brain works we cannot be sure about enything. Anyway great thread.

[Wnd]

Well I guess you shouldn't trust anyone

[aliveonearth]

Bit coin wallets 1password and drop box what do people think ?

[Wiper]

Having an "everyday" wallet where you cash out from your pools or everyday transactions and another "savings" wallet where you transfer all your savings to which is encrypted, offline, and backed up (offline via usb or other source) is a great way to go.

True that, you can't spend enough time researching and protecting yourself as well. It's much better insurance to do this BEFORE you dump your savings into btc. The more you know...........

[wildemagic]

Seriously. Don't trust the exchanges, don't trust online wallet services, don't trust your anti-virus software, and don't trust anybody online.

If you absolutely must trust someone with your bitcoins, for the love, choose carefully!

Thanks for the advice, informative post.

kind regards

[claywelch]

Good advice, thanks for posting.

[earthsound]

good to see security advice threads in the newbie section. you can never be too paranoid when it comes to IT security, though there are some thresholds most people have to draw the line at, for practical purposes, as a few people have reiterated in this thread.

most people, unfortunately, will never be certain that the device(s) they use are secured/uncompromised. it's a risk everyone has to decide whether or not to take in order to utilize the electronic tool(s) at their disposal.

if you think you have to be paranoid now...just wait until the singularity emanates and we have the ability to jack into networks and systems directly with our minds.

[coineta.com]

I am running bitcoind behind two router with firewall enabled. I see some dropped TCP connection requests to port 80 and 443 to my computer. I wonder if it was caused by bitcoind somehow. I don't have these ports open. How they got behind routers?

[goa tse doh]

I recently got this offer. Does it seem legit?

Im looking for AP(Alertypay but now known as payza) funds, if you could deposit with your card into your own payza.com account, we could do the exchange either with exchangezone.com or whatever other method you would prefer.

I will do the exchange at face value with no fees above the 2.5% + 25c receiver fee I would pay from receiving AP funds from you. Send me PM or reply in this thread if interested and we can figure something out.

[Conch]

Interesting read, seems a bit drastic. I usually generate all my password randomly and keep them all inside a master key in my web browser, and the ones I use most, I physically write them down in a notepad then lock it away somewhere so no one else can look at it - No one looks at it anyway as I have no friends in real life and I trust my family members.

I'll definitely use this advice though, thanks!

[coineta.com]

You can try the site that I am working on www.coineta.com to exchange funds using Paypal. I might add support for Payza in near future

I recently got this offer. Does it seem legit?

Im looking for AP(Alertypay but now known as payza) funds, if you could deposit with your card into your own payza.com account, we could do the exchange either with exchangezone.com or whatever other method you would prefer.

I will do the exchange at face value with no fees above the 2.5% + 25c receiver fee I would pay from receiving AP funds from you. Send me PM or reply in this thread if interested and we can figure something out.

[ilovethisshit]

Wow. Your password ideas suggest deep paranoia. Warranted perhaps?

[nastyone]

Seriously. Don't trust the exchanges, don't trust online wallet services, don't trust your anti-virus software, and don't trust anybody online.

If you absolutely must trust someone with your bitcoins, for the love, choose carefully!

• Do you know their full name?
• Do you know where they are located?
• Have they demonstrated trustworthiness in the past?
• Are they asking you to trust them? (red flag)
• Do they have insurance?

Insurance? Impossible, you say. Not so!

When I needed people to trust me to hold bitcoins for a contest, I deposited 50 bitcoins as a bond with a well-respected forum member, so that even if I did something stupid and lost people's money, they would still be reimbursed. You can read about it here: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=10008.0

Consider carefully who you will trust. With bitcoins, elaborate scams may be profitable. For instance, someone may develop trust for their user name over many months with small transactions on this forum, then take advantage of that trust to make off with a lot of money. Such a scam would only be worth doing on this forum. No other forum in the world would be worth the effort.

If you want someone to hold your bitcoins for you, there are NO online services that have the transparency and security to make me comfortable using them for storing bitcoins for more than a short time in small amounts. The only way to do it is like I did - choose someone whom you believe to be trustworthy, and approach them. If they approach you, or in any way say or insinuate that they are a trustworthy person to hold your coins, STAY AWAY.

If you are thinking that I might not be trustworthy, since I am writing this post about the issue, you are approaching the appropriate level of paranoia.

If you want to store your bitcoins with maximum security, there are lots of resources about how to do it, such as this: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet

Here's my summary:

1. Put all your coins in a new wallet that has never connected to the network
2. Encrypt that wallet with the maximum security you can find, using the most secure password you can keep track of
3. Delete the plaintext wallet, and distribute the encrypted wallet to every piece of physical media you own, store it online, and send it to several people you trust

Don't think you can generate and remember a secure enough password? Create a super-long password, and store clues to help you remember it. For instance, your password clue file might say:

My standard password + My throwaway password (backwards, all caps) + &#$%@ + First two sentences of first paragraph of page 19 of my favorite book (include all capitalization and punctuation) + My wife's mother's middle name + My son's favorite superhero + My favorite number times 8734 + food my wife hates (backwards, all caps) + 9-digit number stored with my paper will + 10-character password stored in my safety deposit box + . . . .

You can go on in this way to create as long a password as you want. Store this password clue file with your encrypted wallet, and optionally encrypt both with a simple standard password to keep out snoopers.

In this way, not only can you recover your coins from your "savings account" at a later date, if you get hit by a chicken truck tomorrow and die, your loved ones can probably piece together your password and recover the coins too (better make sure you trust them, and that between them they have or can get the answers to those clues).

I recommend that you practice your wallet encryption and recovery a few times with a small number of coins, until you are very comfortable with the process before you try it with the bulk of your savings.

And remember, this is how most bitcoins services get started:

https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-lgm4poF3JWE/TgsHwby-BlI/AAAAAAAADwQ/twan94HT6p4/020.jpg

Comic from: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=13903.0

The only one I trust is my son.

[maestrodo]

Good advice,

I do like the idea of trusting people on their reputation though, but were to start off to build a reputation.

Greets,

[Samor]

I think it depends how much funds do you have. I often engage in transactions where
I'm fully prepared to loose the funds involved. If the transaction would be too large
for me to allow such loss, I try to split it in smaller parts. Surprisingly, I have met very
few scammers.

[Kazimir]

+1 extremely paranoid here too.

Besides "trust no one", I also like to stress: NO compromise when it comes to securing your bitcoins.

Here's what I do:

I have a dedicated VirtualBox VM with Ubuntu which I only use to run the Bitcoin client. I use an encrypted wallet. I store this wallet in a small truecrypt container (inside the VM). Furthermore the VM itself (well, the .vdi disk image containing the actual data) is inside a truecrypt container on the host machine.

I also make sure to have frequent remote backups (in case my house burns down, my PC gets stolen, the FBI takes it, whatever). After every few transactions, I compress the truecrypt container (I mean the small one inside the VM which contains just the wallet) using 7-zip with AES-256 encryption, and send this .7z to three webmail addresses (one yahoo, one hotmail, one gmail).

All passwords (for the truecrypt volumes and the encrypted wallet and the 7-zip archive etc) are 25+ random characters.
The passwords are stored in KeePass (and in the truecrypt mount and backup scripts in the VM so I never have to fill them in manually, except when I'd need to restore a backup).

I will not get f*cked.