What's the biggest real security mistakes non technical bitcoiners still make?

[Rubuchi]

Alot of technical discussions in this board focus more on solutions to advanced attacks or technical solutions towards future risks but from y'all experiences what will you consider as the most common and dangerous technical or non technical  mistakes many regular non technical bitcoiners still make today. Is it poor seed phrase backup, trusting of wallets blindly, or choice of wallet, reuse of addresses or lack of passphrase or something else? I really want to know what actually causes people to lose their bitcoins based on your practical understanding?

[Pmalek]

I think it's a combination of a few things, not just one.

Making digital backups like photos of your seed and storing them on your phone, cloud and/or email is one mistake. If that image gets in the wrong hands, it's goodbye to your bitcoin.
Downloading fake wallets because they saw a recommendation somewhere on Telegram, FB, or a different social media, without researching what they are downloading.
Acting before thinking and asking questions is another common mistake. You will hear about cases where victims got a message and were tricked to import their seed phrase or download an updated piece of software. They do, they lose their crypto, and then they start asking if that was the right thing to do.

[Zaguru12]

Personally I will also say all the stated above problems are actually there a cause but with choice or trust of wallet and improper back up of seed phrase the most of it all.

I usually place all of this before on ignorance or naivety of the newbies but along the line I actually say it’s more of carelessness. Why I sad it’s carelessness is simply because you will see many bad reviews of a certain wallet and many people will still be stuck with it until they get to be the victim. (example is ledger,  Trust wallet and other closed wallets)

This carelessness is why some is still using hot wallet for long term storage or for saving huge amount of coins because they feel it won’t happen to them, not knowing that scammers do not share notice of when they can strike.

My advice has always been you should simply go for a reputable cold wallet for a total newbie simply buy hardware wallet which are open source or airgapped and not try to set up your own cold wallet with hot wallets like electrum because while it’s secure cold wallet lack of technical knowledge can make one to make mistake and that wallet will be live online (hot wallet)

Also while choosing back up simply go for offline back up either using Materials that can withstand some pressures and also have multiple backup places but beware of redundancy again

[Cookdata]

The real security mistakes are the little things we overlook. Out of all, there is non that come close to protecting your seed phrase or private keys. If you can do this, you have won, every other things are secondary.

Now, there is difference between security and privacy, you asked about security but I see you included reused of an addres has nothing to do with security, also not using passphrase doesn't bring security issues, it's just an extension of words and it's optional.

Things that can cost your wallet security can be poor back up of seed phrase, using of unrecognized software wallets that are not open source; in fact using a software wallets are not recommended for large quantity of Bitcoin because of malware and lastly don't  use centralized exchange as wallet. Use a an airgap wallet for better security.

Privacy is upto to you, the more you expose about your Bitcoin, the liklely you becomes a target especially when you have large Bitcoin. Address reuse and spending many inputs in a single transaction expose everything about your privacy, learn to use coin control.

[Kruw]

The biggest mistake Bitcoiners make is using a light wallet that leaks their entire balance and transaction history to third party Electrum servers. If you need to use a light wallet, make sure it supports client side block filters so you don't get spied on.

[casey15]

There are a lot of mistakes made that are non technical and one of the ones people often overlook is storage of seed phrase digitally.
A lot of people still don't know that storing seed phrase on their phone note pad or as a file or in the cloud is absolutely not safe.. because any breach and it can be stolen. Someone you know and close to you may even go through your phone and steal them without your knowledge and you wouldn't know how your funds disappear.. The best way to store your seed phrase remains offline .. wrote it out somewhere and keep it where only you can find....

[noorman0]

Unwilling to learn technical side, they often prefer to store their Bitcoin in centralized wallets.
They lack the opportunity to perform even basic technical tasks, such as sending Bitcoin on-chain, which requires manual setups to get the best network fees.

Knowledge can even be overridden by carelessness, leading to major mistakes. This isn't just about a Bitcoiner's background. I remember the news a few months ago where a crypto developer's wallet was drained.

[pawanjain]

Alot of technical discussions in this board focus more on solutions to advanced attacks or technical solutions towards future risks but from y'all experiences what will you consider as the most common and dangerous technical or non technical  mistakes many regular non technical bitcoiners still make today. Is it poor seed phrase backup, trusting of wallets blindly, or choice of wallet, reuse of addresses or lack of passphrase or something else? I really want to know what actually causes people to lose their bitcoins based on your practical understanding?

So far that I have seen on this forum is that people don't cross verify their destination addresses correctly.
Sometimes they lose their bitcoin just because of entering the wrong destination address.
Also, some people also mess up with the transaction fees and end up sending a huge transaction fee to the receiver.
Not to forget the backups. People don't backup their seeds or others don't keep it very secure.
These are some of the common mistakes that people do that end up in losing their bitcoins.

[PrivacyG]

This is a long subject and it is hard to find the 'biggest' mistake a non technical Bitcoiner makes.  It varies and the biggest mistake I made may be very different from yours although they have the same level of consequences.

If there is one thing I regret the most, it is that I had a period of time where I did not care enough to learn about the Pseudonymous nature of the Bitcoin Blockchain.  So I thought because the Address is a string of characters it means it will automatically be very hard for any body to start putting the pieces of the puzzle together and find out which of the Addresses belong to me and who I am spending to or receiving from.  If I could cover up all my initial traces, I would pay a good amount of Money to do it.  Not because they hide any secret or illegality.  But because I believe it is an enormous mistake to not care about your finances being linked to your own unique identity.

It is obviously not a good thing to be extremely paranoid either.  But when there are creepy companies crawling all over the Blockchain and the Internet looking for ways to track you down and creating all the dubious algorithms to do Blockchain Analysis on every step you make, I believe it is fundamental to care about the links you create and the finger prints you leave behind.  When you add situations such as people being tortured to death because the wrong person found out they were Bitcoin millionaires, it should only become even more important.  But for the most part, Bitcoin is a very long learning curve and you often find your self realizing how little you know the more you learn.  Mistakes can be things as stupid as sending some body your Bitcoin because you believe they are Elon Musk and will send you twice back to things as sad as being tortured after leaking who you are.  It is extremely important to care, to look for answers to any questions you may have and to keep learning every time and particularly from every mistake.

[nakamura12]

I would say that it's a combination of what you just said. It's all about blindly trust wallets without further research and poor backup of the seed phrase and security. If you think about it that most people who lost funds are about wallet being compromised like someone has access to the person's own wallet or a breach of the app that the person used to store the seed phrase. Another thing is about not checking the address more than one that results in sending to another wallet address or the wrong wallet address.

[bitbollo]

I would say as first of all trust in general as trust strange coins or meme coins by dumping a lot of money on it. or a "Fake Elon Musk" that claims a 2x miracle project sponsored by him
Secondary I see as a real issue problem with a private key. Online generators of keys, or even using claimed scam has been seen really often.
Last that could be seen as common is signing messages that you don't understand. Once you sign a message ... you give grant for a specific action...
Other errors could be related to tx fees and how to broadcast them. its really easy send btc to a wrong address or delete a change address and so on...

[Abu-Naim]

Is it poor seed phrase backup, trusting of wallets blindly, or choice of wallet, reuse of addresses or lack of passphrase or something else? I really want to know what actually causes people to lose their bitcoins based on your practical understanding?

Aren’t these reasons enough? If one lack understanding on how to handle these things you mentioned, they are not yet Bitcoin investors, they should be learning because they will obviously make mistake that will cost them a lot.
You can have less technical knowledge but you are very good in saving your seed phrase, having good backup for the seed phrase, knowing how to send Bitcoin transactions, learning how to doublecheck wallet addresses before proceeding transactions and learning to download the right Bitcoin wallet in their respective official platforms.

[EluguHcman]

I really want to know what actually causes people to lose their bitcoins based on your practical understanding?

Wallet may be a point such as those using custodial wallets like the regulating exchanges that does not give users full control of their wallets access like the recovery seed phrase.

We also have to talk about hot wallet which are vulnerably immuned to be compromised my scammers due to its device interactions and related Internet networking that gives access of the wallet after manipulating and bypassing with malicious files in your device.

Lack of privacy can be immune to exposed your security keys, lack of knowledge or ignorant can lead you click on virus links that can give unauthorized access to your wallet and get your funds lost.

[KingsDen]

Saving their seed phrase online. I am surprised that many people still think this is the best practice even after several warnings against it. Non technical people like to save their seed phrase in their email or Google drive. But this is real dangerous though.

[CryptSafe]

The mistake has always been an issue of key backup; some use Google Cloud to store such sensitive information, some screenshots and store them on their phone, while some just being to careless of their safe as they store their keys and this has resulted to many loosing their assets to hackers because whoever gains access to your email which holds your key details store in google cloud, that person can als access your keys and do the unthinkable with it. The best way is just to write down your keys and keep them where only you can access them at any time, at your will. Only then would the risk of you losing your assets be limited.

Another thing is the rate at which one downloads apps and grants them access to their device. This is where the problem is, because any app you grant access can be able to get information from your device without you knowing that, and they could use this against you by hacking your wallet to steal your assets if you have your keys stored on your phone.

[BitMaxz]

If we talk about the common for new or nontechnical users, then it's not only a single issue or mistake. The common is the backup seed. How exactly you save this? In my first experience, this was my issue: the first wallet I created before doesn't have any backup anymore, which ended up losing some of the faucet earnings before. I thought having a wallet on my PC was enough, but if you do this and treat your backup as a non-important piece of your wallet, then you will end up losing it when you need to recover your wallet.
Another thing is the security mistakes. Since this new era has had many online attacks, I do not recommend new or nontechnical users to just randomly generate a wallet on unsecured devices. If they are going to use a device that is always connected online, then, like others' mistakes, their wallet are still vulnerable to any attacks, like randomly accessing websites that execute some script that can manipulate your transactions in the future or remotely access their device without you knowing.
That's why I always recommend generating their wallet in an offline environment and never connecting their device to the internet.

[Amphenomenon]

Acting before thinking and asking questions is another common mistake. You will hear about cases where victims got a message and were tricked to import their seed phrase or download an updated piece of software. They do, they lose their crypto, and then they start asking if that was the right thing to do.

This is one easy way for one to fall into social engineering attacks sadly especially when such individual is communication with an account that can be link to his/her identity/location. The ironic fact that anyone can fall into this if they are not cautious, after all the scammer doesn't come to scam first but rather gain trust and then one is vulnerable to their schemes and attack.

Unwilling to learn technical side, they often prefer to store their Bitcoin in centralized wallets.
They lack the opportunity to perform even basic technical tasks, such as sending Bitcoin on-chain, which requires manual setups to get the best network fees.

Technicality are not necessary in coin protection basically. The on-chain transaction is something also in the CEX, and sometimes I consider theirs more complex since it has different options.

Wallets like Bluewallets gives users simple understanding, there is the send and receive with other options to increase fee or replace fee and even if they don't bother about that, it still gives good fee estimation, not like CEX or some said non-custodial wallets like Trust wallet.

Knowledge can even be overridden by carelessness, leading to major mistakes. This isn't just about a Bitcoiner's background. I remember the news a few months ago where a crypto developer's wallet was drained.

One thing I have come to notice about such scams on technical individuals is that this is often through social engineering attacks or carelessness.

[Mrbluntzy]

The biggest mistake that I think non technical Bitcoiners would always be making is to have weak privacy about their Bitcoin holding, they are more careless with privacy compare to how those people with Bitcoin technical  knowledge handle their privacy to prevent easy tracking and investigation, those Bitcoiners without technical knowledge can not apply the measures that are required. Not using multi signature set up which prevents the stealing of our coins easily. Like myself, I have not used it and I don't know how to do that easily because I don't have technical knowledge but I really would have love to do it knowing that if I do it, my coins security is stronger, therefore I consider it a big risk.

[JiiBs]

I think it's a combination of a few things, not just one.

Making digital backups like photos of your seed and storing them on your phone, cloud and/or email is one mistake. If that image gets in the wrong hands, it's goodbye to your bitcoin.
Downloading fake wallets because they saw a recommendation somewhere on Telegram, FB, or a different social media, without researching what they are downloading.

These are the very common ones that I think, anyone who comes into this space for the first time without any proper orientation would make. It always carries in it a sense of safety, safety in the fact that the device you are handling is yours and for those that stores data on the clouds, they trust too much on these for systems for backup and feels it’s easy to have these data recovered.

Some might even message themselves on social media as a way to back that up give it’s 2-way protection policy and you wonder how your message gets leaked in an investigation…

These are very unreliable and can at the least unexpected time constitute a security breach that one might not get to recover from.

[Chikito]

In the digital era today, many people rarely use a pen and write sensitive information on paper. They are accustomed to writing it on a gadget, shooting it, or copying and pasting it.

That old tradition, which can provide stronger security, has been left behind. Today is so rushed; many people want to be quick and practical, and forget that digitalization have a negative impact on monitoring all of their activities on gadgets.

The hackers are getting more sophisticated today; they can monitor all the CCTV in your home just to know if you have the crypto.
 
it doesn't mean I refuse the digital, but we have to find a safe way how to combine digital and analog approaches become safer and more practical.