018 Bitcoin HORROR Stories With BTCsessions: Mistakes That Cost Everything - All In Bitcoin With CK

right now when it comes to privacy it's interesting i feel like we've done a bit of a whipsaw because about a year year and a half ago a lot of problems begun to roast and i'm not saying that those are resolved because there's court cases and everything but we saw samurai wallet shut down we saw wasabi wallet sunset their coin join coordinator and so like a lot of these things just started disappearing

but what we've seen since then outside of the course just strictly from a technology perspective is coin join coordinators pop up in the wild so you can sub those into wasabi wallet and it will now function again we saw a fork of samurai wallet including the whirlpool coordinator so you can coin join again and that is live now and so these tools just came up but anonymously developed and and out there in the wild again, which is great to see.

All views expressed by the host or guests are solely their own opinions. Nothing stated in this podcast should be considered a specific endorsement to make any particular investment or follow any specific strategy. Welcome to All in Bitcoin, Ben. Part one was just the beginning. I'm excited to talk to you about Bitcoin and more. Yes. Ready? I'm ready. Okay. What's in your censorship survival kit? Let's start with security.

The more you can live on a Bitcoin standard, the better. I don't, you know, it's not that I don't have a bank account or a credit card. It's that I use a bank account with dollars literally as seldom as possible.

my whole life is is bitcoin effectively like my my income how i pay my bills all of that is is bitcoin now does that involve services and on and off ramps and things like that in a lot of instances yes but i think when you're talking about censorship resistance in a financial sense I think the number one tool that all of us have are local communities and relationships. Because if you're reliant on on and off ramps to be able to use your money, those can be shut down.

But if you have a relationship with the person where you get your beef or your barber or whatever it may be and they know you and you like how do you tell somebody you can't give somebody sats for eggs tough it's gonna happen it's the same as if i was paying somebody in cash my current mission is is we're building a circular economy in calgary my city with the sap market and um i think it's just so important. Yeah. Let's talk about your 2FA and your OPSEC practices.

Well, OPSEC, I'm screwed. So that's out the window. When it comes to, you know, security, password managers, 2FA, all that kind of stuff, it depends on what is being used, what's being protected. So, I mean, like password managers, obviously very, very important in terms of having different passwords for everything and no redundancies so that if one account gets compromised, it's not all of them. It's cool. You can self-host your own password manager. So like I'm a big fan of Start9.

So using something like Bitwarden, I like that. That's a possibility there. When it comes to even like Bitcoin keys and stuff like that, life savings for me, I feel a distributed multi-sig is so important.

I constantly worry about the idea of somebody gets access to a single key and has access to your entire life savings. That's a problem. So, yeah, I think a multi-sig, like from my comfort level, that's my preference. Do you think it's for everyone or just for public people like us? I understand. For some people, especially if you're pretty discreet about it, a simple hardware device with a seed phrase kept safe, maybe a passphrase with your seed, I think that can more than serve the purpose.

it really depends on the individual comfort level and where those things are being stored and the trust you have with the people around you. The reason you have a multi-sig would be you're concerned that the seed phrase that you're back up is a single point of failure. You're concerned that somebody is either going to stumble across that piece of information or somebody is going to be able to coerce you where you are to access a single key. And so if somebody's assessing

if they need a multi-sig, it's what's your level of concern of physical coercion? Because a multi-sig buys you, at the very least, buys you time when it comes to physical coercion. Like somebody's going to have to go to a lot more effort in order to coerce you to divvy up geographically distributed keys. So I wouldn't give a dollar amount to that. It's how worried are you about

that scenario? Next, communication channels. When it comes to communication, there's, you can, if you want to be private about things, again, like things like signal, something that I saw presented actually in Riga that I think is very interesting that I'm going to dive into is it's called Glock. They did a bit of a workshop here prior. I wasn't able to attend, but they're working on building an application that's basically an encrypted, private,

within your small community, whoever you want, like an alert button. If something happens to you, you have a private communication alert, go out to friends and family that will only share specifically with them your current location and that there's an emergency or something like that. So things like that, I think are super useful and I look forward to investigating more. I worry about private communication. We're all walking around with devices in our pockets that are constantly listening.

So it's a hard one to answer. I don't have great answers there. So next one, on hosting and infrastructure.

Self-hosting website is not something that I've done thus far. A lot of the networking stuff around there is pretty tricky. When it comes to networking, I'm not super well-versed. I do self-host some personal data. So I have a Start9 that I use at home. And so not only can you have like your Bitcoin-related stuff on there, but you can like files, passwords, photos, all that kind of stuff.

And I think that's super useful because not only do you benefit from the privacy of that because it's not owned by somebody else's server, but it's also censorship resistant. You can't be booted off your own infrastructure. So I'm a big fan of the sovereign computing movement and I think that projects like Start9, even like Umbral and MyNode and there's a number of others out there, I like where that's going and I keep on dabbling in that. So I do like the self-hosting movement.

Yeah. Lastly, on monetization and support.

Yeah. Value for value is great. In its current state and just with a number of people doing it, I saw something I was chatting with, I think, was it Joe? Joe Hall I was chatting with, and he's like, he does a lot of the value for value thing, but it's not going to pay the bills. It's not going to put food on the table. Currently, anyways, that could change.

And for myself, having the channel be sustainable was just sponsorships. And so it's making sure that anybody that you align with is aligned with you, right? Like I'm going to, I like Coldcard. I courted them as a sponsor because I was like, hey, I use this all the time. Would you sponsor my show kind of thing? So a lot of the time that's what it is.

Whereas, you know, some derivatives exchange comes in trying to sponsor, well sorry you going to have to walk around back out that door But in terms of yeah like the technology to be able to you know accept Bitcoin payments and invoice and all that stuff, BTC Pay is an incredible tool. You know, you can self-host, but there's some networking nuances with that. Or you can host it on something like Luna Node or Voltage, or, you know, there's a number of solutions. And it's great.

You can fine tune it to exactly what you need. It'll go directly to your own wallet. You can accept Lightning and Onchain, all these different things. Another cool one that I like to use is ZapRite. There's a bunch of awesome guys that are working on it. Parker Lewis being one of the people on the team that a lot of people probably recognize his name. That one's cool because it's very user friendly and they've got all these plugins for different

options. And again, they don't hold the money for you. It's just like a portal so that people can see a nicely presented page or invoice or whatever it is. And then it just links to your own Bitcoin wallet or cold storage or lightning node or however you want to do it. So I think ZapRite is great. Right now, when it comes to privacy, it's interesting. I feel like we've done a bit of a

whipsaw because about a year, year and a half ago, a lot of problems begun to arose. And I'm not saying that those are resolved because there's court cases and everything, but we saw Samurai Wallet shut down. We saw Wasabi Wallet sunset their coin join coordinator. And so like a lot of these things just started disappearing. But what we've seen since then outside of the course, just strictly from a technology perspective, is CoinJoin coordinators pop up in the wild.

So you can sub those into Wasabi Wallet and it will now function again. We saw a fork of Samurai Wallet including the Whirlpool coordinator so you can CoinJoin again, and that is live now. And so these tools just came up, but anonymously developed and out there in the wild again, which is great to see. So I like that for on-chain, seeing those things resurge, but also a lot of your layer two wallets that you might use for day

to day spending are going to give you some degree of additional privacy. It's not a silver bullet, but it's helpful. Using Lightning as a sender gives you some additional privacy benefits that are pretty good. Using something like Liquid, the amounts are blinded. So nobody can tell like

You can still see that a transaction took place, but nobody has any idea how much it was for. Swapping into and out of liquid using something like Bolts, there's going to be some privacy benefits there. Even when it comes to things like cashew and fediments, the e-cash on top of Bitcoin, those transactions are incredibly private, but there's a tradeoff with custody there. So there's some flavors of things depending on what you're trying to accomplish for everybody, in my opinion.

You're a pro at onboarding people to Bitcoin and you make it look easy. Do you sometimes feel like you are walking us through a minefield? A little bit, yeah. The amount of anxiety that I get over like, what if I taught somebody something wrong and they screw up and lose money? Or what if one of the apps that I use ends up having a security flaw or something like that? I worry about that quite a bit.

And unfortunately, all you can do is just deal with the tools at hand and just say, hey, I tried using this and I liked it and I thought it was cool. And so I'm just showing and just say things like, this is new. Be careful. Maybe you don't put a lot of money in this, but you can experiment and play around. The minefield thing is real. And as with anybody that's using these apps and things like that, it just needs to be conscious and careful.

But I try to be pretty meticulous in how to use the tools. It's always worrisome. Yeah.

Building in the Bitcoin space is tough. What toll has it taken on your mental health, your time, your relationships? I feel like as soon as you get into Bitcoin, we're all a little bit crazy. So there's that aspect. It's like, how do you talk to regular people anymore? My mind is always just kind of spinning around like, oh, what's currently going on? Or it's hard to turn off. Just recently, I took my first real vacation where I wasn't, you know, it's not.

And when I say real vacation, it's not like I don't travel with my family and do stuff. But most of the time, I'm traveling with my family and then also working. And so I just took my first real vacation, two-week vacation where I didn't work in nine years, like a week ago. It was tricky to turn off the brain and say, I need to be checking things and I need to make sure everything is still okay. It helps that now it's not just me working on things.

But yeah, I think it's a little bit ruined my ability to fully relax, but I'm working on that.

ever hit burn out and seriously consider faking your own death and starting all over um maybe i haven't ruled that out i don't know um the ideal situation is that i become obsolete they're like people you know nobody really needs a tutorial on how the internet works anymore right so eventually it'd be kind of nice if everybody's like cool we got this now we know how to end great I can just fade into the background um we are so far from there you know that

but it might it might come quicker than some people think right like we I remember the transition from everybody was on like a flip phone or like a regular kind of analog to everybody had a smartphone. That was like three years. It was weird because I, again, I'd usually get stuff a little bit early. Like I was the Blackberry Pearl, you know, some of the early like smartphone esque type things. And then iPhone came out and I had that like right away. And then all of a sudden,

if you didn't have a smartphone, you were like a boomer. Like that was the mentality. But it happened, the transition was super fast. It was like nobody had one and then everybody, and it was like, how can you not have a smartphone? I wonder if at some point, and I do think at some point, that's just kind of how Bitcoin's going to be. And for us that have been, that will have been around the Bitcoin space when we're like, why is nobody getting it?

That transition will be like, whoa, what happened? But for everybody else, to them, they haven't been sitting around waiting for it to happen. So it'll just be like, yeah, you don't have a Bitcoin wallet? What are you talking about? And I feel like for them, they won't be as appreciative of this seismic shift that just happened, which will be a little unfortunate. But I feel like that might be how it plays out. What keeps you motivated to record yet another tutorial?

I don't know. It's fun. Honestly, it is fun. I love tinkering with whatever new thing comes out. And there's just always so many cool new tools. And I remember when I started the channel, the question I would get, oh, you're doing Bitcoin tutorials every week. Are you just going to run out of stuff to do? the list of stuff that I have right now that I want to cover in tutorials is growing faster than

time is passing. And so, yeah, there's always something new and amazing to cover right now. And it's very seldom that I don't feel a draw to want to cover something new and interesting. so what's the worst mistake you've seen someone make after watching one of your tutorials

that a good question it funny a lot of the mistakes are just little misunderstandings that actually can be rectified okay um But that can still cause a lot of panic So like I remember there was a guy and he was really panicked He was like, I bought Bitcoin and I sent it to my wallet and it's not there. And the exchange said they sent it and they're trying to prove it to me and they're showing me the transaction. My wallet says zero. And they're saying there's nothing that they can do right now.

And I'm like, okay. And we just kind of drilled into it. And he had Sparrow Wallet on his desktop. And it was just this little button in the bottom right that makes sure it's connected to the Bitcoin network. I was like, is there a little button in the bottom right? Can you tell me if it's off or if it's yellow?

he's like there's no color and like click on that and then the bitcoin showed up he's like oh my god you saved my bitcoin i didn't save your bitcoin it was always there it just wasn't on so um lots of little funny things like that no no like huge crazy uh screw-ups post-watching tutorial it's usually when i hear nightmares it's it's pre-tutorial and then they're and then they're coming saying i think i really screwed up how to what what did i do how to and sometimes those

stories are awful like people losing large amounts of bitcoin to primarily scammers things like that yeah yeah any story that comes to mind there's a guy uh that i had a call with and um he lost his life savings to a scammer, a sizable amount of money that it took him years to build up. And unfortunately, it was a family member that encouraged him to, again, get your Bitcoin yield. Like, oh, you'll get some Bitcoin back. And he deposited to whatever platform it was.

And it wasn't real. And it was all gone. So he had to start from scratch. And he did start from scratch and but when he came to me he's like i just want to confirm that this is gone and uh i looked yeah it's gone but to his credit he's like all right well i'm starting over and i'm going to do with best practices and started on the path to okay how do i cold storage all that kind of stuff and just start it over it's what you say to his credit many people would have just said i hate

Bitcoin. I don't want to know anything about it. What's a mistake of your own that you still think about? Like a technical one, like where I screwed up or what? Anything. Anything. Funny enough, not too many like really detrimental financial things where I've like lost Bitcoin

because of a technical mistake. Surprisingly, there's been tons of little ones where I'm like, it just comes with the territory i'm gonna try this brand new wallet that nobody's used and it's still in like alpha and then you go to use it and it's just like well there goes 50 bucks or something and everything i do i'm like i'm just gonna do it for real uh and so yeah i'm sure some of the skin in the game over the years probably adds up to a fair amount that's been lost but at the time it's

like, you know, 50 bucks or something. So there's been a number of those. But again, I'm going to go back to not mastering my spending habits. I think those are the main mistakes that I look back to where it's like, what was I doing? Like, I'm spending, I'm living beyond my means. And then I'm using Bitcoin that had grown in value or sometimes in a bear market that had shrunken value to go and cover my bad spending habits.

So those are the ones where I'm like, oh God, if I would have gotten that under control earlier, I would have been able to save so much more. All right. Time for the woe stories. This is the All in Bitcoin sessions lab. Real failure, real pain, real lessons. What's the most common trap new users fall into? I mean, the new users, the most prevalent thing is they think they can't self-custody. They think, I'm going to be safer with this exchange, so I'll just leave it there.

Or they may have heard that self-custody is better, but they're like, I'll figure that out later. I'm going to leave it for now. And they just procrastinate forever. And they never take that step. What's a cold storage setup that looked bulletproof until it wasn't? Paper wallets back in the day. I mean, I used paper wallets for a little bit as my literal cold storage early on.

was that was like my first like hey my look when i look at like what would have been on like a flimsy piece of paper that was like yeah i i did have it redundant at least i had it printed more than once in different locations but it's still like a piece of paper with like a qr code that anybody anyways so paper wallets especially created from like a website where you're like you have no idea who, you know, if that website is still valid and if it, anyways, it could be

malicious. But people did that all the time. And that was like an early thing. It was like one of the early videos that I did. It was like, oh, this is how you use a paper wallet. I did show how to do it offline at least, but, but it's not a thing that I would do now. Like nobody says like, oh, go make a paper wallet. But the newcomers, they won't know all the pain that you went through. Yeah, and back then there weren't really hardware solutions.

And so, yeah, cold storage, I'm not a fan of Ledger. Mainly because there's a number of reasons, and some people are going to disagree with me on this, other people are going to be saying... I'm not saying I will. Yeah, fair. Part of it is that it's not open source.

part of it is that it's not bitcoin only and you know when you're when you have support for all these other coins with greater complexity there's greater potential attack vectors i also you know there's the whole debacle with their ledger recover where it's like hey we're gonna take your key and yes even though they're splitting it into pieces it's still going up to a

cloud somewhere by multiple parties. And they're on record having said, like, if they had a law enforcement request that yes, of course, they'd be able to provide the keys to the authorities, which then leads me to say, like, what if somebody internally pretended there was a law enforcement

request? Like, it opens itself to internal malicious intent of a rogue employee. So I'm not a fan of kind of the direction that that's gone and it's always been closed source so that was that's a whole other thing but as i've learned over the years um i've leaned away from that as a solution yeah and let's not forget that they get hacked from time to time the handling of customer data has uh for lack of a better term left a lot to be desired i was caught up in that

too, just in terms of like, I always get scam calls. And I had somebody call me and threatened to kill me three months ago. And the person specifically said on the phone, once I called out,

like, I know this is a scam. I know what you're trying to do. The guy specifically said on the phone, I'm going to get all your crypto, which would denote that it probably, this is how the person knows that you know i'm a quote-unquote crypto person but yeah and then threaten the oh i'm gonna come to your house i'm gonna kill you great thanks ledger where are the measures in in place for these threats uh so i mean if you're buying anything

like you're buying hardware or anything like that um you know ship to a po box would be better if you don't have to provide personal information even better. I know that CoinKite itself, so if you getting like a cold card they sweep they wipe their customer database at regular intervals But if you want your information gone sooner then you can specifically email and request that they remove it and they will. So just things like that. As I said earlier about Opsack, I'm kind of screwed.

So that's just how that is. But if you're really concerned about people knowing you have anything, then obtain Bitcoin non-KYC. So there's a variety of options that you can go online depending on your jurisdiction. You can use things like HODL HODL. And so that facilitates linking you with another person who wants to sell Bitcoin and obtaining it that way. And then some of the privacy tools that we mentioned, like CoinJoin and all that.

Back to the lab, I forgot my passphrase. My wallet is locked. Is there any way you can save me? What happens is when you've got your 12 or 24 word backup, adding a passphrase, which can be any mix of letters, numbers, characters, whatever, it creates an entirely different wallet based on the exact characters that were entered.

if you change one letter number character of of that it creates an entirely different wallet and that wallet will just have never been used it'll just show up as a blank wallet so there is no it's it's kind of like you know you if you can't find the vault you can't open it You may have most of the key, but if you don't know where the money is, you can't use it. And that's kind of what happens. So the answer would be, you cannot save me. You could try brute forcing it.

If you have a general idea what it was and you're close, then I believe there are companies that offer a service of like, hey, what do you think the passphrase was? And then we're going to run an algorithm and just try and brute force with lots of different combinations, but potential common mistypes, things like that. And there may be a possibility that you might recover it. So if you have an idea what the passphrase is, it's possible.

But if you just flat out don't know what the passphrase is, no. What's the worst multi-sig mistake you've ever seen and how did it play out? the ones that stand out to me that I would see as common mistakes would be not understanding what you actually need to retain in order to access your money. So you can think of it like this. Let's say you have a multi-six setup that has three keys and you need two of the keys to

unlock your money. A lot of people think, okay, as long as I have two of those keys, I can always access my money. But that's not exactly the case. When you create a multi-sig wallet, it also creates a file. It's like a descriptor file. And this descriptor file is basically saying like, hey, there's a digital vault holding your money and this is the map to where it is.

that file usually it's like on it'll be on the computer like or on the phone in the wallet so that file will be there and so there's always like a copy that allows you to see your money and know where it is if you were to delete that file and simultaneously you lost one of your keys you cannot unlock the vault because yes you have enough keys to unlock the vault but you don't know where the vault is in that scenario i outlined though that's also incredibly unlikely because

what do you have to lose you have to lose the file the the the map you also have to lose uh you know like the hardware and then you also have to lose the backup seed phrase for the hardware so you have to lose three things for that to play out if you have the three keys whether it be the the hardware or just the seed phrase for all of the keys, you can recreate the map. So again, multi-sig is designed where you can lose a lot of things and still have access. And there's just specific instances.

People get overwhelmed, though, because there's a lot of parts and they don't know what they can lose. So there's more panic than I think necessary there. But the other multi-sig thing that I would say is you may know how it works, but if something happens to you, your family needs to know what's up. So I'd say that probably the number one thing is having good documentation for your family of like, hey, just so you know, this is the wallet.

Here's where I've distributed the keys so that if something happens to me, you can get it. Or doing like an assisted multisig where that process is automated for you so they get everything they need. For the assisted multisig, the one that I really like is Nunchuck. So Nunchuck is primarily a mobile first wallet. But it allows you to use things like Coldcard and TapSigner and a ton of other hardware, actually.

But it allows you to automate the process where in an encrypted way, your family members, without having to know a lot, they will get a key. Even if they don't fully understand what they're doing, it allows them to have a key and in tandem with a key that Nunchuck has, obtain their inheritance afterwards. And it also prevents Nunchuck from being able to rug pull the money from anyone.

And all they need is what you give to them is three English words and a password, like a string of numbers and letters. And so when the time comes, they get an email that says you have an inheritance. What are your three magic words and what's your password? And then the next thing, it's like, OK, you have Bitcoin.

you can either put it into a wallet on your phone to get started or you can send it to a different bitcoin wallet and it basically hand holds them through and says like this is what you need to do and it'll just it's all very automated that's interesting that's very nice you know um i sent btc to a black hole is there any fix so like you sent it to an address that is not your own short of the person who owns the address and you politely asking them to send it back,

there's nothing. It's like there's no take backsies. Have you seen any real fee disasters? What happened? Yes. Fee disasters in terms of overpaying fees and things like that. The one that I saw, and we're not out of the woods for this, I think it'll pop up again, but we've seen obviously spikes in fees for various reasons, but a lot like right around the time that ordinals before people stopped caring. When that was happening, a lot of people,

they're not familiar with the idea of UTXO management. And like, so somebody listening to this doesn't know what that is. A Bitcoin wallet, it's not just a balance. It's not like, oh, you have this amount of Bitcoin and it's just one thing like a bank account balance. It's more like cash. So every time you receive a Bitcoin transaction, it's like getting a new paper bill in your wallet. And when you open up your wallet, you can see all the bills.

With Bitcoin, the fees have nothing to do with the amount that you're spending. They have to do with the amount of data that you're using.

and in the digital world the amount of bills in your wallet however many bills that you're using each one of those is a little piece of data and so when you have to pull out like let's say you're spending a hundred dollars and you had to pull out a wad of a hundred ones there's a little fee attached to every single bill that you're using and that can be very very expensive and be a large percentage of what you're spending. Whereas if you have a hundred dollar bill, it's a single fee

because it's a single piece of data. And so it doesn't stack up as much. So I saw some nightmares with people in and around the time that ordinals were happening and they were trying to, they had to do urgent transactions for some reason. And they have all these tiny UTXOs and fees are insane. And so then not only is it just a bad time to be spending on chain, but their wallet is in such disarray with tiny pieces of Bitcoin that it just wasn't economical to even move money.

And what's the lesson there? So the lesson there is, one, if you're a person that is actually utilizing Bitcoin day to day, get yourself in a lightning wallet and learn how to use lightning. I didn't really, like the fees didn't affect me. But actually, we have, a market. We had a local market during one of the fee spikes and it was like $70 per transaction, but everybody's on lightning. So we didn't even notice like that day we didn't care.

So the lesson there though, would be if, if it's your on chain Bitcoin and you're looking at your wallet, it's not, especially if you're like DCA and you're buying small bits of Bitcoin, if you're pulling it to self custody and small amounts, like 20 bucks, 50 bucks, a hundred bucks, you're you have all these small bills sitting inside your wallet and so what you can do when fees are low is you just send your money to yourself and it's kind of like you had a bunch

of tiny gold coins and you melted them down into a gold bar and what that's going to do is if fees are high later then you don't have as many pieces of bitcoin to pay fees on good one what are the most common reasons Lightning payments fail and what are the simplest ways to fix them? So oftentimes it will be something to do with liquidity. So a Lightning channel is just a Bitcoin locked up between two people. I'm a Lightning node, you're a Lightning node.

There's Bitcoin locked up between us. It's a multi-sega, actually. I have a key, you have a key.

but we're just sending more or less messages back and forth or pre-signed transactions back and forth saying at any time we can settle and you're going to get this much and I'm going to get this much but extrapolate that out to you have channels to other people so I can bump payments through you to others and so what can happen is especially if you're going to send like a large payment we may have a large enough channel but maybe some of your connections you don't have a large

enough channel so there's not enough capacity to facilitate where it needs to get to this will primarily happen if either yourself or the vendor is kind of set up themselves it's not like an automated thing and they have small channels or they don't really know how to do channel management. If you're just looking for an easy lightning spending wallet, there are a few good options that still keep you self-sovereign. So if you don't want to deal with channels at all,

if you're like, listen, everything you just said is Greek to me. I don't want to deal with that at just use aqua wallet aqua wallet like it it's it actually uses something called liquid network in the background but there's like a an auto swap that happens meaning that you can receive a lightning payment but then you end up with what's called liquid bitcoin which is it's a side chain of bitcoin we're getting a little bit technical here but nonetheless the crux of it is it functions

in the very same way where you don't need channels. You just have like a UTXO you have, you can just send freely. You don't have to worry about any lightning channels.

So that's a very easy solution. If you're a purist and you want to have like your own lightning channel, but you don't want to think too much of it, then something like Phoenix would probably be the route that you would go where you can receive lightning payments or you can receive an on-chain payment and it will just automatically create a lightning channel for you and then you can just freely spend and it doesn't matter there's some nuance to the channel side of

it if you're going to be receiving a lot um you can just check the tutorial yeah i'm not i'm not going to get too technical with it but if you're if you're purist and you want the channel um then I do Phoenix. Phoenix. Okay. What's the most underrated thing people forget to back up and pay for later? Honestly, it's silly, but it's the number one thing that everybody should do. It's just like, where's your seed phrase? Where did you put it? Like just remembering where you put it.

Because people will write it down when prompted, mostly. But a lot of people, they'll just shove it. they're not thinking much when they put it somewhere, especially if it's kind of early on and then they start adding more and more to their Bitcoin wallet later and then all of a sudden it's more than it was. Yeah, it's just like keeping track of where did you have everything. The other thing in and around that, it's not just not backing it up, but it's testing the backup.

This is where people really run into trouble because they'll write it down hastily and they'll never actually try restoring it. And sometimes people will miss type a word, like miswrite a word, or they can't really read their writing. And then there's this panic moment when they go to input it to a wallet for recovery for the first time ever, because they deleted something. They're like, oh, I'll get my backup. And they've never done this before. And then they type it in and

they're like, it's like, that's not a valid seed. And then you're trying to figure out, okay, which one of these words is wrong and how did I write it wrong? And it's that's a panic moment for a lot of people.

So back up your seed phrases But more than that practice recovery when you start the wallet when you create the wallet And I would even say do that recovery with a little bit of skin in the game Not a lot but like send 50 bucks to the wallet delete it and then do the recovery process and see if it works And if it doesn't, you can take it as a learning lesson of you just learned a $50 lesson instead of a $100,000 lesson later.

How can someone's cousin pull a boating accident and what can go wrong? You know, we always, everybody always jokes about their boating accidents. I don't, you know, like, obviously neither of us have Bitcoin because we love boating. Yeah. We just always lose it. But yeah, the reality of somebody saying I lost all my Bitcoin and trying to say that and not being truthful about it, you have to maintain that provably into the future.

So let's say for whatever reason, somebody said, I have no Bitcoin anymore. And like they stand really getting in trouble if they're caught lying. The precarious situation they've now put themselves in is if at any point in the future, there's an on-chain, well, really any movement of Bitcoin that indicates that they own Bitcoin at that certain point in time, especially on-chain, then it stands to reason that they held that

Bitcoin the whole time. So you say, oh, I lost the keys to my Bitcoin. It was in this hardware wallet. It was here in this address, but I don't have access to it anymore. Okay. If you say you lost the keys or destroyed the keys and it moves, you're instantly proven wrong. You say somebody took the keys or stole your Bitcoin and it's moving on chain and you lied. The lie may hold up for a little bit, but if at some point you use Bitcoin, you send it to an exchange under your

name. You make a purchase of something that then gets shipped to your house. You do anything that identifies you in any way. And it's a child's transaction of the original funds. It's like you had it the whole time. He also tried coin joining, but doxxed himself. What's the most common coin join privacy fail? Oh, so yeah, if you CoinJoin, the simplistic way of thinking of it is you're sending Bitcoin to yourself, but you're doing it in tandem with a whole bunch of other people.

And there's no, it makes it difficult to decipher what pieces of Bitcoin, what UTXOs on the other side of that transaction now belong to you. but if you then move all those coins that you just coin joined all together in a singular transaction like let's say you just for just for uh simplicity you had 50 million sats and you coin joined it and then on the other side of it you get all these little chunks of bitcoin that that are more difficult to link back to the original chunk that you had.

But then you take 50 million sats and move it to cold storage on the other side in a single transaction. It's like, well, there's that person from the beginning of the coin join just putting their money back into a cold. So you undo the work that you did.

it's typically like the the co-mingling of your coin join coins alongside something that identifies you as as an individual too so you send some bitcoin to an exchange or you make a purchase somewhere that requires id or whatever and then you co-mingle the change from that with some of the other coins and stuff. You can kind of think like as soon as on the other side of the coin join, you do something that indicates you own a certain UTXO. If there's change from that,

and then it moves in tandem with some other coins, it indicates common ownership. So you just have to be conscientious of what you're doing and who knows what you own if you're worried about privacy in that aspect. So knowing this guy, what's the most common mistake he's probably making with his Bitcoin node right now? I think a lot of people just don't know what the purpose of their node is. So a lot of people will say like, oh, I'm helping the network.

I'm going to download and run a Bitcoin node. And then they download the Bitcoin blockchain, and then it just sits there. And that doesn't really do much. Yeah, in a way it's like, oh, there's redundancy. There another copy of the Bitcoin blockchain out there But the point of running a node it kind of a selfish action It self It accomplishing a couple

things. One, it's the don't trust verify ethos. Instead of asking somebody else to tell you if you have money and check the blockchain for transactions, you're checking your own copy.

when somebody else is running a node you are going by the rule set and the information that they have elected to run so they could in theory feed you malicious information and mislead you about your balance it's not a common thing that happens but in theory that's it could happen the other thing is a privacy and implications too if you're using somebody else if you're not running your own node, rather, what you're really doing is if you were running a node and I was

using your node to check my balance, I'm literally saying, here's all my addresses. Can you check if I have money? And you would say, geez, that guy at this IP address seems to have this much Bitcoin.

Maybe I'll pay him a visit. So there's some privacy implications there. But a lot of people, again if they don't know the purpose of the node then they might not be using it they just download it and they think they're helping bitcoin in some way but really the point would be to connect your wallets to your node so that you're checking your own balances from your own copy of the ledger what's the sneakiest social engineering trick you've seen in 2025

So there's two that stand out. One is this getting into people's Google accounts and then using that to access everything. And the way it works is you get a call, hey, this is Google security, whatever. We had somebody try to access your account from some suspicious sounding place.

we want to we flagged it but we want to confirm it's not you is that true and of course you're like oh yeah no that wasn't me thank god you flagged it kind of thing like oh I'm safe and then they're like okay so we can we can lock it all down just make sure that person doesn't have access we're going to send a code to your phone to confirm that like with the phone number on file to confirm that it's you. Just let me know the code so that I can confirm that.

What they're actually doing is they're triggering your 2FA recovery, texting you the code, and then you're telling them the 2FA login code, and then they reset your password, and they get into all your stuff. So is Carrie. Yeah. And that one works on a lot of people. Unless you've heard of it, you may not know what's going on. So there's that one. There was also one with, I think it was Calendly, and it wasn't real Calendly. It was like a fake, oh, like book me for a podcast.

And so they would pretend to be, they would pretend to be like journalists or something and reach out to prominent people saying, oh, we want to interview you for Forbes or something like that. Maybe somebody has like a book or something that they're launching or whatever. And so they say, yeah, just book a time here.

The person goes to book a Calendly link and because of the permissions that are granted, they'll like take over somebody's Twitter account and then start posting malicious like, oh, buy this token or like here's an investment scheme or whatever. Just like capitalizing on the audience and then trying to funnel those people into scams. Wow. Yeah. So let's zoom out a bit as we wrap up. What's something you still don't understand about Bitcoin?

There's a lot of new things happening that I feel in the dark about. So one of the new things that I'm trying to wrap my head around is ARK. It's like another layer two solution. I don't get it. I just, I don't, I do not get it. I did my first ARK transaction two days ago. If you ask me how it works, not a clue. So I'll get back to you on that one when I understand. And I'm sure there'll be another new thing. Also RGB, again, like another kind of layer two thing.

Apparently works with lightning as does ARK. Not a clue. Don't know. Is there a Bitcoin horror story you wish you were never told? Yeah. Yeah, and it's, I wish I was never told, but I'm glad that I was told so that I can be aware and more conscientious. But it's the kidnappings and things like that, where even for trivial amounts, people just being physically coerced or picked up or tortured and stuff like that, and that scares the hell out of me. but it's also important to be aware of.

People can get very desperate and do crazy things for what some would consider not a lot And again in one of the presentations that I listened to recently about personal safety and all of that, there's been instances where even for as low as like $6,000 people have—so you think, oh, I'm not an OG, or like I don't have that much Bitcoin. And oftentimes it doesn't matter. It's just people see and think, oh, Bitcoin's expensive. Somebody's into Bitcoin. I'm going to target them.

So I think just the general, like the rash of kidnappings and threats that we saw in France earlier in the year. And there's just always stories like that and they're becoming more prevalent as time goes on. It scares me. But, you know. Someone in your circle has been kidnapped? Not anybody specifically that I personally know. But, again, it's more just hearing those horror stories is scary. What would you recommend to avoid these situations? I mean, if you can, you know, remain private.

But in some instances, you may not even want to discuss that you're even interested in Bitcoin. That's really hard for Bitcoiners to do. But obviously, never discuss how much Bitcoin you have, ever. If you say something online, like, I have X amount of Bitcoin, even if it doesn't sound like a lot today, 10 years from now, it could be an entirely different story. Somebody could go back and see that post and go, oh, interesting.

yeah so so being cautious with financial information you know home security things like that multi-sig in terms of just like protecting the wealth itself and when you go to conferences like good practices again I think this is going to be a difficult thing moving forward but just making sure that you're in groups of people that you trust you know if you're in social situations like you never know like what if somebody puts something in a drink or

whatever people following you home or like people finding out what hotel room you're in things like that um you've got to be conscious of that and not only that but things like public wi-fi all that using vpns making sure that uh you just stay on like your cell phone signal as opposed to like don't don't use the conference wi-fi all that kind of stuff and don't wear bitcoin t-shirts Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. So what's a lesson you learned the hard way and wouldn't trade for anything?

Very broadly speaking, low time preference and how it applies to more than just your financial decisions. I think that like financially, you know, earlier I talked about I was treating the symptom, not the cause. I was paying off the credit card, not fixing the spending habits.

I think a lot of these low time preference things can extend out to health and even just how you live your life, treating your body right, treating your relationships right, and just all around having a healthy approach and a well-balanced approach to life as a whole. I think that's a valuable lesson that Bitcoiners are learning.

And in terms of the work perspective, like there's been times where I've neglected my personal health because I was doing a whole bunch of work that I was like, this is important. But if I'm unhealthy, then I can't do the work. And so it's all finding a balance in between. There's no free lunch, really. You got to make sure you take care of yourself. Will you repose this conversation across all your legacy platforms and Nostra, of course?

Yeah, yeah, of course. It's awesome to be able to share them. Thank you, Ben, for your time, this generous conversation. I've learned a lot from it. Where can people follow you and your work? Yeah, so I mean, you can find me on YouTube, just search BTC Sessions. On X, just search BTC Sessions, look out for the fake accounts. and on Noster, BTC sessions at primal.net. You should be able to find me pretty easily there.

And if you're specifically on that education train and you're just looking for kind of like a fast track, what are the important things I should learn? I actually have created a dedicated page where it's like one video from each major topic from beginner all the way up to advanced. And you can find that. Just go to usingbitcoin.io and you'll land on my learn page. Thank you. It's been great having you on. Can't wait to have you back. Till then, stay sovereign. Thanks for having me.

I appreciate it.