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“My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen”

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Re: “My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen”

#501

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about money, it's about power. If you hold a physical item, you have the maximum power over it as possible. If you want to entrust someone else with it, go ahead, but at the end of the day your access to the item will be subject to their whims and those of the greater political establishment / woke clergy / corrupt and powerful.

Trusting someone else: Well we do this every day with money in the bank, with all the risks that come with it

And the guarantee of dilution. The banks are _securely_ creating debt based digital dollars they gain the interest on.

Since they're already practically minting their own dollars they don't need to steal yours.

And if for some reason the FDIC fails, then they effectively will have stolen your dollars.

Re: “My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen”

#503
post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also use multisig holdings to ease this issue. > So you’re saying that to use crypto properly, I have to secure a physical object that grants irrevocable ownership of my wealth? That sounds bad. Welcome to reality. You'll laugh now, but if you want to hold something of lasting value, that's kinda how it works. Gold is physical and requires security. Dollars lose their value to dilution. Other securities incur…

>Welcome to reality. You'll laugh now, but if you want to hold something of lasting value, that's kinda how it works. Yeah, when I own a bunch of equity, real estate and other intangible rights, I do my best to fit them all into my back pocket too. Sure sucks trying to fit a few hundred acres of well placed development ready subdivisions in my jeans, though.

If these societal constructs fail what good are they?

Don't get me wrong, I think they're all probably decent as investments, buy they're a completely different asset class.

I put BTC in the Gold/Silver category in that it can be a hedge against societal issues. In this particular moment, I see BTC as a hedge against the ongoing de-dollarization and eventual inflation or plain lack of purchasing power that could cause.

I also see it as a means of censorship resistance.

Further BTC or any sufficiently distributed money is a way to limit bank/government power since they actually have to tax instead of minting new money.

Re: “My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen”

#504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still have yet to use my crypto on crime, i have however bought numerous things with various coins..

Just for fun, or why? I try to use my credit card as much as possible for remote purchases, because if the extra legal protections.

I use it because I view the dollar as a debt based slave system I'd prefer was replace with censureship resistant sound money. BTC is pretty okay at that, but my preference is currently Monero.

Re: “My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen”

#505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe don't keep "all of your wealth" and "daily spending money" in the same bucket.

To clarify, the idea is I need to keep my life savings in a fire-proof, theft-proof safe?

Multisig your life savings and backup the seed phrases on stainless steal washers. You can have as many signatures as you like and require whatever quorum you like too.

Maybe put some in Gold, Silver and Real Estate too.

Obviously you should never put everything in one basket.

Stock are to me a different class of investment from life savings type of stuff.

> To clarify, the idea is I need to keep my life savings in a fire-proof, theft-proof safe?

But yeah, you should definitely have a _portion_ of your life savings in a well hidden quality safe.

That said, you probably only need to put one key in a safe. Hide the other and give the third to a friend or custodial service like unchained capital.

For day to day use, transfer what you need to and from cold storage to hot wallets.

The more wealth you have the more security you need, and you should count governmental and institutional actors in you decisions or you will ignore threats from counterparty risk, inflation, confiscation, and taxation.

Re: “My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen”

#506
post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you’re saying that to use crypto properly, I have to secure a physical object that grants irrevocable ownership of my wealth? That sounds bad. Yeah, that's how most things work in the physical world. If you want to secure a widget, then you need to "secure a physical object that grants irrevocable ownership" of it. Cryptocurrencies improve on this slightly by allowing you set up multisignature schemes, so you ca…

Can you go into more detail about how multisig helps? I assume one of the signatures is my hardware wallet. Who holds the other signature? Do they have SIPC insurance?

I briefly touched on it above, but it's basically that you can mint as many keys as you like and require quorum to transact.

2/3 and 3/5 are common.

This way it's hard for a theif to find enough keys to steal your BTC, and you get additional backups in case something happens to one or more of your keys.

Re: “My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen”

#507

Haha! Evidently a complete lack of security or worth judgement. "$300/mo for a rack is expensive" (no, no it isn't) "Someone booted an unknown OS from external media" (no FDE) Machine compromised on the "17th of november* and instead of considering everything compromised, the guy continued using it evidently. Zero sympathy whatsoever, if you can't manage the basics you certainly shouldn't be running it yourself, and…

I still don't entirely get what has happened. So he runs a bitcoin node on a compromised machine. But why would he store (or use) his 200+ BTC private keys there? He also mentions:

> No, they got my cold wallet too somehow

How can that happen?

Re: “My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen”

#508
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about money, it's about power. If you hold a physical item, you have the maximum power over it as possible. If you want to entrust someone else with it, go ahead, but at the end of the day your access to the item will be subject to their whims and those of the greater political establishment / woke clergy / corrupt and powerful.

You're not holding anything in your wallet. It's just fancy login systen to a transaction system that is bitcoin. It's no different from bank login in the end, once someone has it, it can be transferred at will. Sure, the difference is that in banking system bank doesn't need your credentials to do stuff with money but even that when big crypto bois money are involved stops being immutable as DAO ethereum fork proves…

> It's no different from bank login in the end, once someone has it, it can be transferred at will.

Bank login credentials do not confer undisputed ownership of an account. If someone unauthorized gets ahold of them, the bank doesn't throw up its hands and say "welp, nothing we can do now, the account just belongs to the hacker".

Re: “My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen”

#509

Haha! Evidently a complete lack of security or worth judgement. "$300/mo for a rack is expensive" (no, no it isn't) "Someone booted an unknown OS from external media" (no FDE) Machine compromised on the "17th of november* and instead of considering everything compromised, the guy continued using it evidently. Zero sympathy whatsoever, if you can't manage the basics you certainly shouldn't be running it yourself, and…

I still don't entirely get what has happened. So he runs a bitcoin node on a compromised machine. But why would he store (or use) his 200+ BTC private keys there? He also mentions: > No, they got my cold wallet too somehow How can that happen?

After reading some of the (many many) replies to tweets, it seems the story is pretty much what I summed it up as: he got compromised and failed security 101

They likely used the access they had to further infect or snaffle credentials etc - a very simple and obvious one is reverse SSH tunnels for example

Re: “My PGP key is compromised, and at least many of my bitcoins stolen”

#510

This all stinks. Between the bio, the vague tweets about server hacks (implying Intel ME or a physical server compromise is at fault, really?), the vague tweets about this situation... Something fishy is going on or wow, really proof that sometimes it's just about being in the right place at the right time because wow dude does not have the first clue about security. Hot wallet, compromised, unrotated servers, come o…

Not to defend Luke but I nowhere read that he stored wallets on the hacked server and I think he explicitly stated that the server was not used for wallets.
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