Comment by can16358p
4 months ago
While this is devastating, the lesson that we should all remember:
Never, ever, no matter the circumstances, store private keys (or seed phrases) on photos. Especially if those photos are synchronized to the cloud.
Hand-write them, store them in a safe and secure PHYSICAL location.
Of course we're humans, we make mistakes, and we usually start with small amounts of money that we can lose where it would be unnecessary to take all these precautions, but we still need to regularly remind ourselves to avoid disasters like this in the self-custody world.
I think a lot of people bought some crypto early on when it was really cheap, were kind of sloppy about the security of things, and then left it alone and ignored everything while it went up by 10,000x in value. Now when their account is worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, their security is pretty inadequate for something with that actual value.
Many people have accounts worth hundreds of thousands of dollars of non crypto assets but are relatively safe with the same level of security (or even less) than what crypto demands of its users.
Well yeah. Which shows that, despite the poor understanding of some in tech of how conventional finance actually works, it's dramatically more secure than any type of crypto at securing large amounts of money for actual users.
Honestly, that part of the story seemed completely unbelievable. I mean I get that someone might stare such a photo in the cloud, but hackers are really going to run a scam on him and then sift through photos thinking “maybe?”
I'd assume there's some model for finding those kinds of photos
Ok but you have to balance that with the risk that your PHYSICAL item will be lost, stolen, or destroyed. What happens then?
The problem is that the security protocols required to keep cryptocurrency safe are simply untenable for any mere mortal. But hey, we keep blaming the victims… because they didn’t know the one simple trick to keep their Bitcoin safe!
or store them in some encrypted form that you know how to reverse easily but which would take an attacker more trouble than it was worth to break.