Habits to keep your bitcoin secure

[dihari]

Since the first time bitcoin has a value, lot of people have lost their money or their bitcoin by various accident. Sometimes they just fall into scams, some  are just fail to manage their wallet. Most of all is a human error. Now, you can break the chain of problems by learning from the old stories.

- https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/15/uk-man-makes-last-ditch-effort-to-recover-lost-bitcoin-hard-drive.html
- https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/as-it-happens-friday-edition-1.5875363/this-man-owns-321m-in-bitcoin-but-he-can-t-access-it-because-he-lost-his-password-1.5875366
- https://www.ledger.com/hack-flasback-the-mt-gox-hack-the-most-iconic-exchange-hack
- https://www.cointracker.io/blog/how-a-farmer-lost-100000-bitcoins
- https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/romance-scam-police-bitcoin-fraud-coronavirus-pandemic-b1801549.html
- https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-devon-51205126 (Bitcoin fraud victim, 75, loses £11k in life savings)
- https://www.coindesk.com/dumb-mistakes-costly-bitcoin-losses
google it for more stories.

Understanding the role of human error in losing bitcoin

Buying and storing bitcoin means you have to deal with all responsibilities to keep your bitcoin secure. it's just like your paper money on your leather wallet, if you can't keep it safe at your pocket most likely you will lose your money or your wallet. If you are new to this section, make sure you read all the pin threads in this section. Its provide anything you need to know to store your bitcoin and choose your first wallet.

One thing that everyone said after the wallet intalled is, never ever share your private key, password, passphrase etc. All you can share is only your wallet address to receipt a bitcoin payment.

Backup your wallet

Why you need to backup your wallet? we are human, familiar with mistakes. It's maybe you forgot your wallet password, you broke or lost your devices, etc.
Copy backup file and keep it secure.
Write down your seeds to a paper and store it in a place where you store your important or secret stuff.

Clean devices.
Make sure your device is clean and always like that before and after (it means forever) installing wallet. Keep your device secure and be your own anti virus.
Beware of a phising sites when you surfing the internet within your devices. This article will tell you more about phising https://www.keepnetlabs.com/crypto-phishing-techniques/

Transfering bitcoin

You may sent your money almost everyday through your bank account. It works the same way to bank transfer, bitcoin just eliminates the third party which is the bank. So it needs your effort to secure your transactions.
- always double check the recipient's wallet address
- everytime you want to copy paste the address, always remember this thread How to lose your Bitcoins with CTRL-C CTRL-V

Investing

We're all have our own greed. Control your greed, and you will be safe. Million dollars has been sent to the scammers. Something like investment programs who are lure of giving high or even unreasonable rewards makes people fall to these scam investment. How to know if it scam or not? "As everybody has told me: if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is."
Always do your own research, don't invest on something just because someone said it's good. Being critical is needed when you have to deal with money.
If you think someone on twitter is legit to manage your bitcoin or they hypnotize you to send your btc, just check the address! Websites to check bitcoin transactions or addresses from scammers.

The total Bitcoins lost is about 20% of the total BTC in circulation, due to these human error.
However, your bitcoin is your own responsibility. You can't blame other people for your lost. All you need to start your safe way is don't be lazy to read and learn. I am not trying to be expert here, this is just the way i remind my self.

Learn something more technical
PGP Signature - Encrypt/Decrypt message - Fingerprint
How to sign a message?!

Keep safe.

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[SquirrelJulietGarden]

- Use non-custodial wallets: https://notyourkeys.org/
- Verify bitcoin wallets because many fake bitcoin wallets are existing to steal your bitcoin.
- Back up your wallet file and private key or mnemonic seeds.
- Keep your backups safe and secret.
- Do not disclose to the others that you have bitcoin.
- Do not store your backup online (in third party services, in email, chats, ...)

You did not write about wallet verification
- Bitcoin Core verification
- Electrum verification

[lovesmayfamilis]

A good selection of articles on which you need to learn from other people's mistakes.
It is important to keep these stories in mind at all times, and not to be arrogant, or lazy, to be careful with your keys. Yes, this applies to everything in general, if there is a rule to archive everything regularly, then you can look more confidently into the future.
All stupid deeds are usually performed on a hothead. Therefore, so that something "grows" doesn't matter the business is or ordinary tree, you need to understand how to do it right. The main thing is not to rush and act very neatly.

[20kevin20]

Just a little info to add: by device cleaning, I'd mention that the best one you can do is wiping the hard disk and fully encrypting it. Most popular Linux distros offer this capability and works flawlessly.

I'd also add that having a virus might protect you from certain viruses, but always remember that antiviruses constantly scan the files on your device. That means your wallet.dat files are scanned probably at least once every week - considering antivirus softwares are mostly closed-source, I would not trust them as much as I'd trust my own clicks.

Verify everything you are about to run/install and always look twice whether what you've downloaded is safe or not. Or even better yet, use the PC strictly for crypto and nothing else. This minimizes a lot of risks.

[mk4]

I think Binance exchange is more secured to save bitcoin, because binance platform is strong and is also easy and faster any time is needed to used, without required second time gas fees charge to convert to local currency.

Literally people who have lost a lot of money in the past on exchanges like MtGox and Bitfinex thought that these platforms was "secure" enough. Try learning from history and use non-custodial wallets if you don't want to be part of the bad side of history: https://cryptosec.info/exchange-hacks

[plr]

I think Binance exchange is more secured to save bitcoin, because binance platform is strong and is also easy and faster any time is needed to used, without required second time gas fees charge to convert to local currency.

No, we don't think so, even if they will refund your coins in the case of a hack, it's not good and recommended to store your coins to exchange if you have 100% trust of your coins to an exchange, you are surrendering your rights to that coin and you are under their mercy, be a responsible investor, learn how to secure your coins and wallet, that's the only way to do that.

[Twinkledoe]

I think Binance exchange is more secured to save bitcoin, because binance platform is strong and is also easy and faster any time is needed to used, without required second time gas fees charge to convert to local currency.

Literally people who have lost a lot of money in the past on exchanges like MtGox and Bitfinex thought that these platforms was "secure" enough. Try learning from history and use non-custodial wallets if you don't want to be part of the bad side of history: https://cryptosec.info/exchange-hacks

Though Binance is pretty secure because of their insurance in place, still I won't advise someone to store their coins long term in an exchange. Because if in case they will be hacked, you don't know when will you get your coins from them and you are just there waiting for them to release your funds.So it is better to have full control with your funds, anytime you need it, you don't have to worry that some platform is holding your funds.

[Welsh]

I want to go into a bit more depth on what it means to be your own anti virus. However, before I go onto that I want to explain how a anti virus program works; Basically, any anti virus software which exists on the market today is nothing more than a glorified database which checks against their stored database any time you scan your machine or download something new to your computer. They use various techniques including simple naming conventions, if the program is registered to a "company" for example, from time to time you might see that Windows executable might have "from x company", i.e Firefox.exe came from Mozilla. Anti virus software also sometimes looks at he libraries which the executable is trying to download, and identifies which ones might be problematic. This is what sometimes results in a false positive. -

Also, a subject which isn't talked about nearly enough is the fact that owning a anti virus introduces complacency, since you expect the anti virus to be able to catch anything that you miss. This ultimately leaves the user to sort of rely on it, which is never a good idea. There's also the issue of anti viruses only being able to detect something which exists in their database, or at least shows similarities to what's in their database.

There's a few other techniques which are used, but nothing really you can't do by yourself. Basically, everything that a anti virus can do, you can do without clogging down your system as anti viruses usually come with their own bloatware (browser extensions) or require scanning at various different intervals of the day which can sometimes impact the way you are using your computer, especially if you are using a lot of the computers processing power anyway.

So, to be your own anti virus you need to follow these rough guidelines;

1. Do not download anything that might even hint that it might be malicious.
2. Do not download anything from untrusted sources
3. Do not connect, or allow anyone to use your computer
4. Do not visit websites that might be malicious
5. Keep your operating system, and components up to date.
6. Stay informed with the software, and hardware which you are using. Note down every piece of software that you use, and make sure that you keep up to date in the announcements regarding security. Many programs have multiple vulnerabilities every year, which often goes unnoticed by the general users.
7. Consider disabling any scripts inside your browser (this can make browsing somewhat tedious, but can be configured for sites that you trust).
8. Passwords. I know that the majority of people reading this have reused a password. This is a terrible practice, and ideally you should be using a password which is entirely unique. If you use a wide range of different types of characters, numbers, special characters then you don't actually need a very long password for it to be considered safe, and therefore its not too hard to even remember complete gibberish passwords.

If you are particularly concerned about security, and don't mind hindering usability for it then consider using virtualization software to download anything which you are uncertain about. This could mean digitally separating your computer, by using a VirtualBox. However, that's not a completely fool resistant approach, and you should consider either going to the extreme of physically isolating your machine, or next best consider using a operating system like QubesOS which uses a much better compartmentalization system than virtual machines do.  

I personally like to use different machines for different purposes which physically isolates my data. However, I've been an advocate for Qubes OS in the past, as its much more practical, and serves its purpose. For instance, you can isolate your network within Qubes OS, or you could simply have a downloading "instance" which you only use for downloading, and it that was compromised then it wouldn't be able to easily transfer to your other instances. This ultimately allows you terminate that instance, without compromising your whole system.

Now, when it comes to storing Bitcoin I personally recommend a hardware wallet when you need to access your coins on a regular interval. Then, make use of a offline machine to store Bitcoin that you intend on keeping there for a long time. So, if you are a trader then a hardware wallet protects you from some of the pitfalls that you might run into, if you are accessing it regularly, and a offline computer which generated the private key, and isn't used for any other purpose pretty much protects you against almost all forms of attacks, and therefore assuring that the Bitcoin that you are holding remains safe, and isn't exposed to the risks that a normal online computer would be exposed too.

Its worth noting that if you do go the offline computer route, then you should only generate the private key on a computer which you are sure hasn't been compromised. They might mean; flashing the bios, wiping the hard drives, or installing new ones, and installing a operating system from a signed source (i.e verifying that Ubuntu came from Ubuntu's servers, and the checksum hasn't changed). Then, its not recommend to use that computer for anything else, unless you intend on storing the private key physically as opposed to using a wallet file on that computer. Then, you should have really encrypted the wallet even if it was generated offline, but if you didn't, or you simply don't want that wallet.dat to exist its probably best that you either destroy that hard drive, or at the very least write 0's to it multiple times, to assure that it can't be recovered.

That's concerning being your own anti virus, but that's really not the biggest pitfall that everyone falls into. Generally, money is lost by trusting other people to keep your credentials, and your coins safe. This is something which everyone needs to cut out. I understand, the need to want or even need to rely on third party services. For example, if you need to buy Bitcoin you are going to have to store that Bitcoin on some of the exchanges. However, you need to be able to move that coin out of their system, and into your own wallet that you own the private key to as soon as possible, whether that's your "hot" hardware wallet or directly into your cold storage. You should not be using an exchange to store Bitcoin for any longer than you need to purchase or sell it. Personally, I think anything over 24 hours is poor practice. My recommended time would be, as soon as you receive it, ship it to your wallet. As soon as the exchange has accepted your deposit, purchase the amount you need. Far too many people have been stung by exchanges that have been hacked or ceased to exist. By, using the above recommendations you are reducing your chances of being stung.

[lovesmayfamilis]

The post above is suitable for a separate topic on security. But let me add a few for the security of the system itself. In order not to suffer in the future, train yourself to create backups. Anything can happen, and the computer breaks down and all information on it will be lost. Creating backups on removable media with critical data and a password database will greatly facilitate your life.

[Coyster]

Basically almost every procedure to keep your Bitcoin safe and protected has been mentioned in this thread, but I'd like to include one that's somewhat unorthodox, and that it's important to avoid telling everyone about your crypto holdings, this one is pretty much the easiest rule to keep, but yet broken by a lot of people, it's 'sinful' to go on telling people you have Bitcoins, they more often than not have the misconception that you're rich and that creates the possibility of a $5 wrench attack, or any sort of physical attack on you.

[AniviaBtc]

I think Binance exchange is more secured to save bitcoin, because binance platform is strong and is also easy and faster any time is needed to used, without required second time gas fees charge to convert to local currency.

No, we don't think so, even if they will refund your coins in the case of a hack, it's not good and recommended to store your coins to exchange if you have 100% trust of your coins to an exchange, you are surrendering your rights to that coin and you are under their mercy, be a responsible investor, learn how to secure your coins and wallet, that's the only way to do that.

There's no such thing as a perfect exchange because most of them do have flaws and errors.

The only difference is on how they will troubleshoot some errors in their system so that customers or investors will experience security and comfort within their platform.

That's some of the reason why I split my coins and not settle on storing it in an exchange. I also have hardware wallets and digital wallet which made me really secured and I handled it properly. We have different strategies on how we will secure our coins so as much as possible, always review or read feedbacks between wallets to know how legit or trusted that exchange is.

[Baskeyairdrop]

I think Binance exchange is more secured to save bitcoin, because binance platform is strong and is also easy and faster any time is needed to used, without required second time gas fees charge to convert to local currency.

It is unwise to use any exchange as a form of wallet to save your cryptocurrency.
You get open to these posibilities when you do so
• The exchange might be a fraudulent one to steal your  bitcoin
• They might fold up at any time without prior notice
• They can freeze your account and request for kyc, which when you provide your ID, it won't be accepted
but to mention a few disadvantages that can happen so be smart about where you store your bitcoin.

[masulum]

@Baskeyairdrop You are right, most of newbie thinking if save their asset in Exchange is more secure then they are keeping in their own wallet. But, they are forget about the rules of the services. hack, frozen account, banned and more reason that will makes user can't get their money again.

[Smartvirus]

One of the most tempting habits that puts a lot of users in danger of loosing the contents of their wallets is,

Being too hungry for quick ways of earnings or should I say quick money and looking for something petty always.

These are enemies of hard work and most persons see hardwork like punishment and as such, they tend to seek the easy way out, loopholes in a way to make others do there investing and monitoring the progress of there investment for them. In this instances, your likely to be met with a scammer, be a victim of hackers or feed your private details to phishing sites.

[aoluain]

It has been mentioned here on many occasions that it is best practice to use a
new Bitcoin address for a new transaction if at all possible, This makes it
difficult to link the wallets to one user.

As the block chain is permanent, it's important to note that something not traceable currently may become trivial to trace in the future. For these reasons, Bitcoin addresses should only be used once and users must be careful not to disclose their addresses.

To protect your privacy, you should use a new Bitcoin address each time you receive a new payment. Additionally, you can use multiple wallets for different purposes. Doing so allows you to isolate each of your transactions in such a way that it is not possible to associate them all together.

[bakasabo]

What about instead (or combined) of making super unique password, writing it on a piece of paper/hiding parts of it in different places, remembering it as a rhymes and associations, putting a capsule with a password in your body and etc, changing passwords more frequently ?

I think that if you have 1 unique password, with help of algorithms, social engineering, brute force and enough time, it can be picked up. But if you change your password once per month, it will be harder for cracker to pick it up. What do you think about that?

[Trinx01]

Yeah, there are a lot of beginners who keep on storing their bitcoin in exchange especially those who try to trade so that they could avoid the transaction fees, well, in fact, storing your asset in exchange is such a bad thing because there are a lot of articles that talks about hacked exchanges. Before I also do the same thing as I always prefer on storing my bitcoin in exchange but now I already changed my habit and now storing my bitcoin in a local wallet.

[*1Bishop1*]

Safety - it's good! But many so passionate about safety, which ultimately do lose their money and can not recover them. Security must be within reasonable limits.

[Pmalek]

What about instead (or combined) of making super unique password, writing it on a piece of paper/hiding parts of it in different places, remembering it as a rhymes and associations, putting a capsule with a password in your body and etc, changing passwords more frequently ?

Dividing the password on different parts and chunks increases the possibility of losing one or more parts of it. After that you have to either bruteforce it or rely on your memory to get the missing characters. If it's a complicated password, bruteforcing won't help, and relying on your memory is a idea bad either way. 

You might have memorized your password, and you know it right now, but what if you have an accident that leads to memory loss? That will result in you losing your coins. or if you suffer a stroke and turn into a vegetable. Many things can go wrong with the human brain and our memory. It's better to not risk it.

Purchasing a hardware wallet seems like the easiest way to keep your bitcoin safe long-term. I use different computers for different areas of my life. The one I use for my financials and work has never visited a shady website, opened an unknown email, or accessed a weird link. I am planning to get another device soon to divide work and financials from bitcoin and coin storing.   

[qwertyup23]

I am quite guilty on this one- especially that I have been transacting BTCs ever since I started on this forum last 2017.

To tell you the truth, I literally have no clue on how create a 'signed message'. In addition, most of my BTCs are stored only in a local exchange which further puts them at risk of being stolen in the event that a scam would transpire. I also lack the necessary and technical knowledge of the basic stuff that I need to know of storing my BTCs but the guide you provided made me think otherwise of my ignorant actions.

Practicing this as a habit can definitely be useful in the long run as this provides an extra layer of security in keeping one's BTCs.