IMO

Jayar9000

Too soon IMO, money is still to be made before they allow the bubble to pop

ScholarPrize1335

This is spot on IMO. Risk on and none of the highest performing high risk tech stocks pump? Both gold and BTC have not had good years. Risk on isn't limited to high upside weak recent performance. It's high upside high recent performance too. More likely it was a compelling narrative, shorts being covered and HFT that can get in and out quickly 24/7.

ActualTangerine2583

Ofc BTC won t go anywhere…but IMO what we witnessing at the moment is not begining of the next bull market…it s bull trap fueled by speculation and market manipulation

Romanizer

Your OP implied so, IMO.

Comfortable_Sir2923

IMO BTC wont go anywhere... Crypto might shift more towards stables as we see in states a lot of work being done to make stables adopted more than BTC...

Charge36

Not a very fair comparison IMO. Yeah going to 0 to 1 is big. There were plenty of crypto projects that never went anywhere. Getting lucky with the one that did is hardly a reliable strategy 

SpareEconomy1849

No, don't borrow money for investments IMO. Bitcoin will be there in 6 months. It may be 2x the price, or it may be half. Nobody knows. I suggest you ask your dad if you can do some chores for extra cash instead of asking for a loan

drew2f

IMO Shorts were squeezed when someone in Trump's circle leaked his notes for yesterday afternoons presser. There is also a chance this has something to do with Bessents comments about buying long bonds, but I think it was partly that, partly a leak and partly a squeeze. Nasdaq and SPY down and BTC up so much seems odd to me.

Hold_To_Expiration

Short squeeze, for sure it's part of the violent moves. IMO.

opensandshuts

I appreciate your willingness to discuss it civilly and know you did not name call anyone. Everyone knows the "value" accrual hasn't been there. My issue with detractors is that they act like they've been rugged, when LINK publicly announced the schedule for selling supply to fund the project. It's no different from AMZN being founded in 1994, going public in 1997, and not becoming profitable until 2003, nearly 10 years after being founded. Are investors mad at AMZN? Any AI search can tell folks that, but it's easier to parrot a "rug pull" narrative. How else are they going to pay a staff of engineers, business leaders, etc. to work on this project for 10+ years? Would folks rather they accept a ton of VC money like Solana and others? IMO, the fact that they are selling the token to fund the growth of the project is compelling. **The 2017 ICO:** Chainlink officially raised $32 million in September 2017 **by selling LINK tokens directly to both retail and institutional participants.** Historical Supply Dynamics & Releases (easily researched): * **Initial Allocation (2017):** The initial 1 billion LINK supply was divided into a 35% token sale (private and public), 35% for node operators/ecosystem incentives, and 30% for the parent company/reserve. * **Economics 2.0 Shift (2022):** The Foundation pledged transparent periodic movements of non-circulating supply (such as capping early targeted releases to 50 million LINK) to support initiatives like staking. * **Quarterly Unlocks:** On-chain analytics routinely track predictable multi-million LINK movements from non-circulating Foundation/Team addresses (often releasing 10M to 20M tokens quarterly) into operational or exchange-labeled wallets. * **Current Circulating Supply:** Out of the 1 billion hard cap, approximately 748 million LINK (\~75%) are in active circulation, while the remaining balance resides across designated non-circulating or staking contract vaults

webisticsmarketing1

its true to a point mainly b/c of real estate IMO. Take a look at any of the "dream locations" you might want to live in the US if you were wealthy. Now look at what even the most basic starter property there costs, in 2026 good chance that it will be over 1M as it is. Once you can afford to buy something and live anywhere you choose I agree that chasing extra $$ starts to lose meaning but the floor is probably something like 3-4M

0x_Crypto_Pirate

IMO while contemplating, start reading books about Bitcoin. The Bitcoin Standard is a good start. Unless ypu really want an out from Bitcoin, then selling is the way. But if you still hesitate, then start reading

generateduser29128

IMO having a 100% Bitcoin portfolio after retirement is a bit crazy. The future returns are also not going to be as high as they used to be. We're hitting the law of big numbers.

MaleficentSelf9790

Bearish monthly candle imbalance @ $72,364.13 But your take is correct IMO. Gotta get back down to 49k before I add more.

nosimsol

IMO too bold to say at this point. It went up for whatever reason, liquidated shorts, went up some more because of that. If it doesn’t hold above 70 I suspect it will bleed out back down through September

crimeo

Although yes if the total prize scales proportionally to the attack cost you can argue security is similar in a sense, I would say that the fact the list of possible attackers drops way down makes it much less likely still beyond that. One of those 5 state level entities has to want to vs some rogue crazy billionaire individual I agree completely on the mining long term situation though. Though ethereum is more likely IMO to take over

Ark3tech

I agree a lump sum is probably best at this point. I believe we’re only talking about a few thousand dollars of decline if it hits another dump. If it does go back down I don’t think we’re going below $57K. If we do, it’ll be a very quick wick, because it will be bought up immediately IMO.

Vast_Stranger_1653

If you take out this kind of sized loan then lose and don't have enough to cover the loss immediately, it will be devastating to your future. Don't play with money you can't afford to lose. 30% of you income is too much IMO, and many others opinions

Electronic_Quote399

People will allocate different amounts, they'll tell you to go all btc or drop one or the other, but it's a good start, its all the basics. I would personally drop xrp, but you probably wont lose money buying it at these levels IMO. I'm not an xrp fan but I grabbed a tiny bit myself because I expect Ripple to throw everyone a bone here pretty soon. Its tokenomics suck, and its heavily manipulated, the company control a lot of the supply. But, as long as you aren't one of those guys who just goes all in, all xrp, all the time... it should be all right. Myself I don't even have any BTC, I'm about 35% sol and 35% ether. If you want a moonshot, consider a little keeta (KTA). I've done very well this year with it. I'm leaning on it pretty heavy right now with 11% of my portfolio, i'm really betting on a short term bounce. I would definitely recommend adding HYPE to your list, though its probably a little too high to buy in right now in my opinion. Throw $10 in, monitor it. If that $10 drops down to about $7.50 or $8, I would say that's a better buy in point. Personally, if I dont own a little, I wont monitor the price, which is why I say grab $10.

No-Wrap3568

It's a genuinely good advice for anyone looking to get started in self custody and find it's technically very complex. The one problem one might face with this is seedphrase management, if you're handling more than 1 seedphrase, you'll really have a hard time defending or keeping safe both of them, if any of the one is lost or stolen, your money's gone forever. IMO having a seedphrase backup device something like a cypher-rock would be a good choice to handle this setup, even I'm doing the same at the moment, I've backed up my sparrow and jade in it, so I don't have to manage any seedphrases, just 4 cards that I keep in different locations, I'm good even if I lose even 3 of them.

haochizzle

much better investing going to network school, edge city goa, or devcon mumbai IMO.

choicehunter

I see your point, but existing transaction fees already cover that use case. It doesn't make sense to punish people more for holding longer to try to force people to spend money quickly while it's worth more. Wasteful consumerism of things that deteriorate quickly is a bad thing to encourage and reinforce IMO. Just leave the transaction fees as transaction fees. They cover the security costs even when mining dust disappears.

sirhowy

IMO, as a newbie, regulated exchange with 2FA with a bit more experience, and effort, a trezor with a strong passphrase.. I'd highly recommend just chatting to AI to run through all the risks and best practises, it's surprisingly useful for that one thing I'd recommend, if going the Trezor route, don't wrote the passphrase into a keyboard, use the device, this is definitely a point of weakness. I don't have one but apparently some of the new trezors have a touch screen keypad. The old ones are a ballache to input everything with just two buttons

my-sec

u/LazyTech8315 Also check out dice towers and/or backgammon baffle boxes. i also recommend getting different colored dices, reason is you can than easily make rules/conditions in what order you write down the numbers. for example 1st is red dice, second is the blue dice and third is the white dice. i personally would just use d6 dices as working with these is best documented and explained. best dice tower suggestion is the: kwikroll-dice-tower I think this is the goat vid to watch on youtube. it will provide 3 independent sources to input and verify the output of your entropy... OFFLINE.This IMO, is a must see. youtube: # Dice rolls with ColdCard: How to generate and verify seeds with Dice uploader: [Southern Bitcoiner](https://www.youtube.com/@SouthernBitcoiner) 11.7K subscribers duration 18.08 [https://youtu.be/hXJNLvAVar0?si=euW6-3fFyTeoUJgW](https://youtu.be/hXJNLvAVar0?si=euW6-3fFyTeoUJgW) [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXJNLvAVar0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXJNLvAVar0)

RedKard76

This is the easiest way IMO. After a month of not accessing my email the wife will get an email where to look for a message with further instructions.

Rotilho

Audit trails and spending limits are the baseline, but I don’t think they are the main blocker. Reputation isn’t either. The harder problems are latency, fees and compliance. Many of the networks used for x402 are simply too slow for machine-native payments. A few seconds may feel acceptable to a person, but an agent may need to make dozens of dependent calls, where each payment unlocks the next action. Those delays compound across the workflow. Then there is the economics. If an API call costs $0.0001 but settling the payment costs $0.0002, the payment rail costs more than the service. That creates a minimum viable transaction size far above the actual value of many calls. Batching or prepaid balances can reduce the cost, but they reintroduce balances, deposits and state—the friction pay-per-call payments are supposed to remove. Finally, this is a part IMO make neglected: compliance remains largely unsolved. VAT and invoicing obligations can apply to each taxable supply, with the treatment depending on the buyer, seller and jurisdiction. That framework was not designed for autonomous agents making thousands of tiny cross-border purchases. Source: I have been building a x402 marketplace.

word-dragon

I wouldn’t call Coldcard a breach of trust. I looked at Coldcard and decided to pass because the company size was small, the rigor in software was not apparent, and I got the sense that they talked a good game. Kind of typical of companies with a charismatic leader that runs fast. IMO people fail to review the companies that make the tools as they would an investment. There is a lot of strong opinions in this area, and a lot of focus on how the product works and what features it has. How solid the company is, and their maturity is usually way down on everybody’s list.

Delicious-Dog-3809

And this is why it's considered a risk asset. It's not FDIC insured meaning if a bank loses your money or you get hacked, you'll probably get it back since that money is FDIC insured, crypto, not so much. Falling for a social engineering scam when EVERY single wallet hot or cold tells you never to share your private keys or setting the slippage to 100% and claiming you fat fingered it, lol, is mentally deficient behavior. I'll give you a counter argument for this. The term not your keys not your coins is very real. I use to keep a substantial amount of money in a certain exchange (like the #1 exchange in the world right now) and they locked my account requesting the most insane forums i've ever been asked for in my entire life after already using them for 6 years with multiple 6 figures, and having submitted my KYC many years ago. After threatening legal action I was able to get my money back 1 year later. If you have under $10,000 in crypto, using an exchange isn't a bad idea I guess, but you're literally just using a bank for crypto which is not what crypto was meant for. It's all relative to how important that money is to you. IMO if you are high 5 figures or 6-7 figures it is insane not to use a cold storage wallet. If for what ever reason you're dumping a lot of money into crypto without understanding how it works, what safe guards you can take to prevent theft, and don't have a very basic understanding of how the block chain works, crypto just isn't for you.

ToddlerInTheWild

Folks wanted crypto to be the earth-shattering tech that AI is…But it’s not. What problem does crypto solve? It was just the most recent fad of penny stock speculation.. that’s all any of the coins were outside of BTC. But IMO, even BTC is toast in the long run.

Potatodemonx

Video quality is too good IMO. I should get off the internet for a while.

Sad-Possession7729

Converting a non-marital asset into a marital asset? Probably not the best long term financial strategy IMO.

KillaCamCamTheJudge

That they do. IMO: a silly thing to spend money on a single evening or day. Doesn’t mean I am not also a victim. Just different strokes for different folks

NotASpanishSpeaker

I don't think a *majority* will be carrying their crypto with them. So I don't think it would be an immediate (say 5-10 years after this apocalypse) thing people will be reusing. Even if a majority of crypto survived, IMO people wouldn't consider it has any value. In the post apocalyptic era you already know what is necessary: water, food, shelter, medicines. There is a long list before crypto comes up.

7MPHSloth

I think perhaps due in large part to the actions of the current "leader" of the United States, and those of his family, have eroded a huge portion of trust and confidence in crypto to those that may have been on the fence about it. IMO this involvement has caused more damage, at least from a physiological perspective, then all the failed exchanges and hacks combined.

TownNo1342

Currently DCAing IOTA. Combining TA and fundamentals here. Chart shows a nice bottom accumulation, and they have huge news coming up with the ADAPT project and institutional adoption in Africa. Highly undervalued IMO.

Purple-Marsupial5855

Crypto is more than a fad… Useless meme coins can be seen as a fad and IMO are done (maybe they’ll jump a bit in next bull market - but really serve no purpose).. but I think coins like BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP will be around

Ok_Golf_6467

Nah alts are just gearing up (select few) for the real melt up. Copper vs gold is breaking out, manufacturing is breaking out, feds have to print, rates will eventually fall. 2024 was just a little faster IMO This is like a once in a decade buying opportunity for some alts that have stayed alive and are still growing despite bearish conditions.

karmassacre

You're never going to settle on a universal definition of "spam", the same way you're never going to settle on a definition of "porn". What you need to agree on is the best way to minimize it with the protocol rukeset while allowing for safe and secure decentralized growth of the network. IMO you don't limit spam by increasing a vector for non-monetary data from 80 to 100,000 bytes.

brando2131

Lightning has its own list of problems which IMO unfortunately doesn't make it good for payments...

MSmithRD

That really sucks. I'm sorry. Hearing this and hearing the other stories in this thread and hearing the coldcard stories I am now convinced more than ever that cold storage is not the way to go. Fidelity crypto or Spot ETF is the safest move IMO. I've heard too many problems with Coinbase to recommend storing it there.

A_Long_Knight

Basically moon IMO. US would likely sanction Chinese companies in response to that kind of attack and this would wake a lot of people up to the fact that governments are imperfect and that even equities are highly susceptible to their government's mood... Apple, Meta, NVDIA... all of these could basically take 80% hits just because President Xi feels like taking over Taiwan...

downtherabbit

Thats forest holdl.... hes one of the best bitcoin content creators IMO simply because of his intellectual honesty, which is exhibited well in this video.

vplatt

> I don't think you can keep your freedom and get protection from official governing bodies at the same time in this space. Well, to be fair, even in fiat systems, you'll never have protection from "official governing bodies". But at least there you'd have some protection from fraud under the oversight of those governing bodies and / or through the financial institutions acting in compliance with the requirements of those governing bodies. It's the completely unforgiving nature of crypto that has kept me out of BTC. Bitcoin custody is not forgiving of mistakes and even as an IT pro, I was never confident that I could successfully safeguard my investments. I knew about the cold wallets, pass phrases, etc. and having read all of that I knew eventually I would make a mistake somewhere and it would only take a single mistake to lose it all. It's not for nothing that financial institutions have 24-hour response teams to attacks, fraud locks, dispute procedures, insurance, and more. It's not just a question of convenience. Most individuals don't stand a chance over the long haul, IMO, when it comes to securely managing self-custody. I know that this is just useless hand-wringing to those of you that have this shit locked down properly, and I'm not saying it's impossible at all; but it's easily "difficult" and I would advise most people do not try self-custody at all. Most of us simply aren't as smart as we think.

suuperfli

it's being debased at an increasing rate. due to the nature of our fiat debt-based system, it is already in the process of dying IMO

Suitable_Acadia_190

I dont make predictions, I just read the tape as it prints. But based on similar of these types of patterns, MUCH higher is likely IMO

Ok_Golf_6467

Looks at the tokenomics closely. Finite supply? Where is the power concentrated, in just a few massive wallets? Do the tokenomics overlap with a good narrative and mind share? If so you got a good value play right now with everything at bear market lows IMO. I have a big bag of pepe and pengu tbh 🐧🍻🐸

leopard-monch

I'm not a fan of metal seed plates, because they don't actually protect you against what you think they do. **Fire:** if your house burns down, you won't be able to search the smoking pile of debris for your seed plate. Sorry. The fire police won't allow that for a while. And once you can enter the remains of your house, you will not have been the first to rummage through it all. **Water:** same with flood. You're telling me, that if your house gets flooded and lots of your crap gets swept away, you'll be able to find that plate? I wouldn't bet my life savings on that. **General decay, mold, etc.:** Okay, maybe here they are better than regular paper. But then again, you still have your birth certificate in that one binder everybody has with all the important documents, right? **Theft, physical:** No protection. Someone breaks into your home and takes it, your money is gone. **Theft, clandestine:** No protection. Someone breaks into your home and takes a photo of your seed plate, waits until you saved enough money with it and then cleans you out. **Accidental discarding:** No protection. Someone thinks this peace of metal is rubbish and throws it out. If anything, the protection is worse. Some official looking document with a fake stamp on it, that also is a seed backup will not be discarded as easily. So all in all, IMO, metal seed backups don't actually protect against the things people always claim they do, and they don't protect at all against the most obvious ways to lose money. Therefore, rather than wasting my time and money on MacGyver'ing something like this, I'd rather spend my time and money on a solution that actually does. The obvious is multi-sig. A simple 2-of-3, with keys and wallet-descriptor stored in physically secure but geographically distant locations, protects against all of the above. Or, what I call "Poor-Mans Shamirs Secret Sharing Scheme", which only works with a 24 word seed. You add a 128-bits passphrase like this [https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1viocw9/passphrase\_length/p2f5pah/](https://old.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1viocw9/passphrase_length/p2f5pah/) And then store the seed+passphrase in a 2-of-3-shard style. * Shard 1: Seed words 1-24. You can even load this up with a bit of money as a decoy wallet. * Shard 2: Seed words 1-12 + passphrase. * Shard 3: Seed words 13-24 + passphrase. As you can easily see, every shard is missing approx. 128bits of entropy to be whole. Any 2 of the 3 shards recreate the whole. In any case, you have to have periodic checkups on the state of your backup. It it there? Has it been tempered with, is it readable, damaged in any way?

Crazy-Fig-4899

That sucks to hear. Bitcoin is bound to return to its 100k range IMO. It wouldn't make sense for the major institutional investment at the 120k range, and short themselves out of profit. If anything I think this is a chance for the market to reset. The united states conflict in the middle east served as a test for Bitcoins utility in maritime insurance. Bitcoin has also proven itself a useful energy regulator in the renewable energy sector for power. I do not see it going anywhere. Hang in there!

Suitable_Acadia_190

100% agree. I think "could absolutely fail" is reaching, but yes while logically possible, IMO probabilistically "not bloody likely" lol

shelby_xx88xx

early adopter phase is over IMO...that ended when BlackRock and the institutions joined the game. it is still overall early though......next big milestone for me is when you can hold crypto and stables in your bank account just like cash and swap in and out.

Suitable_Acadia_190

Exactly, the strongest of all time, and weve been coiling on it priming a double bounce for months now. Its a thing of beauty IMO

6thcoin

Tbh I have bought hundreds of dollars worth of products. I will also continue to use those products. However I would never recommend their products again. Never. I got very lucky. IMO the attention that the code is getting now, I'm not worried. There is alot of entropy code out there that is not allowed to be reviewed. For those that lost stacks I'm sorry. Risk is a sliding scale.

Zestyclose_Ad2462

Props for posting this OP, really took guts. I've been in BTC for less than a year and seen a lot during that time. Big runup to its ATH, followed by 50% crash and now this Cold Card mess. Your warning here is good Karma IMO. It's because of people like you I didn't fall victim to that game. By paying it forward here, good fortune awaits you.

Suitable_Acadia_190

Agree, still have a more bears to load up before this next rounds slaughterhouse, so chop and a nice retest until halloween is highly likely IMO too

PuttForDough

I’d just say the difference between Bitcoin and Crypto. There is no other. Bitcoin isnt crypto IMO.

waitareyou4real

Should really settle down on the dice roll recommendations to newbies IMO. There are great hardware wallets with true RNG. Just opens up more barriers or potential mistakes

undeadkarlmarx

This is why 2 of 2 multisig is often more manageable for people. Two locations is adequate to prevent something like a burglary resulting in loss of funds, and you also don’t have to worry about keeping wallet config info with each key, because the two keys you use to sign will also recreate the entire multisig. The downside is you absolutely need both keys to work, so you want to have a backup for each wallet device, and practice restoring both wallets from scratch and doing test transactions before putting funds on it. I agree with you about seedsigner being too difficult to manage since it requires the QR code private key for signing. I had Coldcard+Ledger and now I’m leaning towards Bitbox+Ledger. I know people hate on Ledger here, but IMO they’re nice user-friendly wallets for multisig where you’re just using them for a second signature.

Subject-Chest-8343

>A hardware wallet’s most important feature is not its seed phrase creation, it’s just a convenient feature. Sorry, I get your point, but I cannot accept the argument here. The seed generator feature was flat out dangerous and shouldn't have been there in the first place, unless of course CoinKite made sure it actually worked as intended. Normally, rolling the dice wouldn't give you anything more besides the peace of mind that making sure your seed is random, because for most people it's easier than verifying the code. It's like the radio on a car... It is a convenience feature. If I say that's a crap car because my radio stopped working, yes you could argue that's unfair, because the car does great at performing its primary functions. But IMO the argument doesn't work if the convenience feature fails in such a way that it nullifies everything else that's working properly Let's imagine the radio goes crazy, and fucks up the car's other electronics, and I die in a crash.... Would you argue it's still a good car, I could simply have left the radio off and I would still be alive ?

PoeCollector

It's fine to question, but IMO you're thinking about it backwards. AI output imitates info articles with a structured argument, which many of us have been writing long before the LLMs mined them to learn how to write. Maybe my style is too generic, but I also suspect people are trained to think a brief "hot take" is human and anything longer and more structured is AI.

Zestyclose_Ad2462

That's what I did too. In fact, I bought 2 ETF's (using diff custodians) reasoning that the biggest risk was custodial failure/hacking/user error. Now we can add gross negligence to that list. Too many black swans IMO. At some point, one is going to occur.

Zestyclose_Ad2462

Here's my take on self-custody: You should have some BTC in a hardware wallet, but only a small amount (say, 10%). The important part isn't how much is there, it's that you've built it should you ever really need it. Keep another 10% on a reputable exchange, 40% in an ETF using one custodian and 40% in another ETF using a different custodian. Presto - 80% of your BTC now enjoys institutional grade security. The .20 or .25 expense ratio you pay every year is money well spent IMO. Especially if you're no programmer/cyber-whiz. We are not there yet insofar as cold wallets. BTC itself takes a LOT of self-education and a cold wallet takes even more. Unless and until there's some recourse for a mistake, hack or coding error, self-custody will remain a fringe activity. We need better tools.

lightbulb-7

having a coldcard was not overcomplicating things IMO. The risk of technology getting better / additional bugs being identified so that funds from other wallets can be stolen in some years' time is not zero I guess

scottmsul

IMO the biggest takeaway is don't trust *any* HWW's. It's still ok to use them but only in trustless ways. Airgap + roll your own dice.

Revolutionary-Cup78

The grind starts with a regular job. Maybe consider becoming a tradesperson (plumber, contractor, Gardener, etc) Save money, invest in diverse assets (I'm not talking about alt coins, IMO crypto as a whole should only be a fraction, less than half of your savings). The only easy path is having the luck of being born a heir, or winning the lottery (don't bother participating on it). You'll have to endure a lot, including doing lots of hard or unfulfilling work. And may still fail like most do

s1ammage

IMO Bitkey is for the spouse/non-technical family/friends that supports your cause. It eliminates the barrier to entry into “self-custody” and is very new-friendly. Better than the ETF, better than holding on an exchange.

undeadkarlmarx

There’s actually no appeal to morality, which is why it’s actually a pretty apt message IMO.

HesitantInvestor0

It's bad enough to be choosing anything over Bitcoin and maybe a small handful of crypto projects. Choosing USWR is like buying magic beans. You can only be mad at yourself for that one IMO.

Dashizz6357

I do still think the device itself is the best, IMO. The software was just absolute garbage. Those 2 things can both be true.

Botlenose

It’s already priced in IMO as if it’s not passing.

CBpegasus

No evidence they "knew about the vuln". James O'Beirne claims he warned them of a potential risk in 2025, that they did shrug off. If he's telling the truth, that's far from the best way to act as a security-based company. But getting warning of a potential risk is far from "knowing about the vuln". Shrugging off potential risk can be simple incompetence (and belief in their own competence - kind of Dunning-Kruger maybe). Shrugging off a known vuln is maliciousness. It might change as more info is uncovered, but I still tend to think the whole thing can (and therefore should, by Hanlon's Razor) be attributed to incompetence rather than maliciousness. There are a lot of weird points in the story if we assume maliciousness IMO. The bug itself is almost too simple as a backdoor, and since it was on the public code anyone else could have found it. One might say it's for "plausible deniability" but I think that's more risk than a malicious actor is likely to take for that. Assuming incompetence does require multiple points of failures and arrogance on the part of CoinKite - but it's similar to things I've seen as a former security researcher. It can and does happen.

ORANGEisthenewGOLD

I own one and it is all I have ever used and know. I’m not the most technical when it comes to self custody but Bitkey makes it easy even though yes you don’t have a seed phrase. IMO the multi sig seems pretty damn safe. It’s owned by Block which owns Cash App and square. They seem to have a pretty good understanding of security with transactions over the internet.

seansy5000

IMO I don’t care if it dumps again and again.

other_acc_banned

Man, I'm so split on that idea regarding a lack of competitive advantage. Yes it is easy to integrate, but doing so in performative manner is less easy. I'm a non-software engineer, and I've only ever worked in systems of systems whose most significant hurdle is integration with other systems. IMO, transformation of business processes to adopt AI is in many ways as difficult as starting from scratch. IMO, you can't expect significant performance improvements from injecting AI into individual systems; the whole operation needs a paradigm shift to reap game-changing performance. If I'm at all correct in this thinking, then it is the novel adversaries that have competitive advantage. In a given sector, the big boys will be reluctant to spend the capital to transform their operations, and if they do spend the money, the implementation will be by people who "have always done it this way." The young guns don't have those intellectual barriers. I suppose this isn't fundamentally much different from what we've seen come out of silicone valley in the last couple decades. But what I think will be different will be the profitability of future silicone valley unicorns. The next Uber won't take a decade to become profitable, and the average unicorn will be building bigger, more complex products than ever before. Consider Anduril, and the kind of products their building. I didn't use AI to write or edit this comment and it was exhausting lmao.

stateit

Good grief. Ledger's hardly gone well this week, has it... Cold storage with a paper wallet is best IMO. Then you don't have to put your trust in anything other than yourself.

KungLa0

It's been dead in the water for so long IMO. It is kept alive by speculation and "get rich quick" investors.

SpiritmongerScaph

While I agree about trusting RNG, having a passphrase does make it more secure, IMO. Coldcard users with passphrases are most lickely safe right now (or at least, they have more time to react).

jwhendy

I plan to regen, but still on the fence about the 25th word. I think there is a *ton* of misconception about the impact of this 25th word, mostly due to our inability to comprehend large numbers and how elliptic curve cryptography actually works. I also admit limited technical knowledge and having a human brain which it turns out is not capable of aligning emotion (namely fear/worry) with the facts/logic behind the size of numbers we are dealing with. I might go back and read up on previous discussions on the 25th word ([example](https://www.reddit.com/r/ledgerwallet/comments/1hsfu3w/what_are_the_pros_and_cons_of_attaching_the/), [another](https://www.reddit.com/r/ledgerwallet/comments/ku00to/what_are_the_benefits_of_using_a_25th_word/); not saying these are excellent, just examples of previous posts) from *before* all this happened. I think you will be fighting an immense bias and misinformation by asking now in a time of widespread panic. That said, 24 words vs. 25 words is just... not relevant for *private key/address security* in a cryptographic sense *at all*, provided sufficient entropy was supplied. The utility is around someone gaining access to your seed words, hardware, or software wallet as you can have multiple addresses using the same seed + various 25th words (functionally, passwords) on top. And that certainly *is* something to consider for operational security. But IMO this is *not* what everyone is motivated by when asking about the 25th word: safety from the ability to guess your key/address. Any time you see "well, we might get the same 24 words, so a 25th is just extra protection against that"... No, no, no, no. The same mathematics that let us say things like "given 256 bits of entropy, your private key cannot be cracked *in the estimated remaining lifespan of the universe*" also means "the generated 24 words will *never* collide with someone else's" [no matter how counter-intuitive this feels to our ape brains]. Thus, I would focus on whether you feel the need to obscure a "real" vs. "fake" address, how worried you are about SW/HW wallet access, how confident you are in remembering this 25th word in n years (and there's no protection to someone physically getting your backup if you include your 25th word), etc. My current leaning is I like the Seedsigner approach. It's somewhat annoying to re-input the 24 words each time, but there's no passphrase to remember and I don't even have a device to worry about, just a physical backup to know the location of. For long term cold storage, this seems appealing. Just my current thinking, which could change as I'm definitely in the "research as I rethink everything" phase!

Zestyclose_Ad2462

My heart goes out to all those affected by this. They did NOTHING wrong, everything they were supposed to and still.... got vaporized. One thing missing here is this: Many of these youtube "influencers" have been pushing to invest in BTC and ONLY BTC, self-custody/cold wallets and get off exchanges. If you questioned that, you were shut down with the "not your keys, not your coins" argument. Going to need a new slogan after this. I am new to BTC and still believe in BTC, but never would I put all my eggs in one basket. Chose multiple ETF's using different custodians, then setup a cold wallet and funded it with a tiny, tiny amount. In addition to that I use a 4th exchange to keep a very small sum on. My reasoning: Blackrock, etc. employs cyber-security experts far more knowledgeable than I. The tiny expense ratio is money well spent IMO, unless you're some cyber-whiz. And no, it's not insured by FDIC/SPIC. But at least there's a chance Fidelity or whoever would make people whole, if they dropped the ball. That and the Fed can always print more $ to give to custodians/big banks (remember the great recession?) to reimburse people. Still, you can and should have low-cost index funds, gold, REIT's etc. Good rule to live by: No more than 10% in any one investment! And self-custody? It's there/built, if the world ends and I need it.

DavidssonA

I have no idea what that means... but I would get your damn coins off that cold card asap. IMO

_2f

IMO update firmware with lots of other changes in the same PR, after some months and many more updates - move towards closed source, destroy brand value, hope no one finds it and years later warn users to update their seeds with new firmware.  But yeah too little too late. I don’t think they can do anything when so many years have passed

genius_retard

Pretty much all it us good for IMO.

Arbiter_89

IMO Right now, the best thing you can do is use a hardware wallet with a complicated hidden wallet passphrase/extra seed word. Even a 4 character alphanumeric passphrase would be like 1.6Mx more difficult to crack than no passphrase and each additional character increases the difficulty exponentially.

Azurebbit

Park it on an exchange OR do the homework to figure out how to self-custody properly (really not hard if you actually look into it). For most people the answer is the former (IMO of course).

trademarktower

It's still a feature. That was a typo on my part. You can review the guarantee here. [https://www.fidelity.com/security/customer-protection-guarantee](https://www.fidelity.com/security/customer-protection-guarantee) The lock down on the account and banning account and money transfers is the best security feature IMO. They also have multi factor authentication and biometrics. Nothing is completely fool proof. I suppose you can think of the most extreme scenarios but seems as secure as anything in the market, [https://www.fidelity.com/security/overview](https://www.fidelity.com/security/overview)

no_choice99

So you've done roughly a x4? From 234 usd to about 1k now? That's not enough to worry about transfering to a cold wallet IMO so you could either wait, buy more and transfer to a cold wallet or just sell if you think prices will tank soon. 

Gehrman_JoinsTheHunt

Yes. We’re going to see many cycles that are different going forward. It’s still an incredibly young asset. Expecting the first 15 years of bitcoin’s life to repeat forever is not a reasonable bet IMO.

djscoox

Thinking about it, passphrases are pretty stupid IMO. If an attacker coaxed the 24-word seedphrase out of you you (e.g. at gunpoint), and they find an amount of funds there, they could suspect or at least consider the possibility of the existence of a passphrase, which is often chosen to be a cryptographically weak word. They could brute-force it in a matter of hours. The passphrase would at best buy you enouth time to transfer your funds from the passphrase protected wallet to a new one, but then the attacker would be able to see those funds had been moved shortly after the attack, which could prompt a follow-up attack now they are certain you own a large amount of crypto. It probably is better to spread the funds between two wallets, a decoy one (the one you present when attacked) that holds a small amount of crypto protected by a regular 24-word seedphrase (no passphrase), and a "main stash" one you never tell anyone about, with a passphrase to protect it from low entropy vulnerabilities like the Coldcard flaw.

BuyFluid5006

How is Bitcoin NOT mainstream? We have ETF’s, companies leveraging debt to buy BTC, there’s crypto ATMs basically everywhere, basically everyone knows what Bitcoin is. IMO it’s completely mainstream. Whether it’s being used is a separate conversation tho

pandelelel

IMO it wasn't that stupid back then. It was a bet on a boom of digital ownership, and the majority of people just wanted to make a fortune from it.

YellowRobeSmith

IMO much better that than dealing with seedphrases, passphrases, firmware, sending and receiving, transferring, becoming a bank, dusting, exposing, leaking, hacks, dice, etc.. If your plan is just investing and hodling then an ETF is more simplified and logical.

Annual-Reference-715

If it's that easy to make a psyop against BTC by actually stealing people's money, it's a psyop that's desperately needed if one actually hopes for large scale adoption. Unless one hopes for events such as this to happen to a MUCH larger number of people. IMO dsasters such as this just show that the technology and its use is still in its infancy. Criminals steal money whenever they can from whoever they can. No further conspiracies needed.

BallisticTherapy

Once the value of your holdings starts to exceed 6 figures in inflation adjusted terms, paper jist becomes too fragile as a sole method, IMO. You have to punch that shit in to steel.

KryptoKed

This bear market IMO has come with even more FUD than the last bear market / FTX blow up. Bitcoin still sitting at $63k is BULLISH

octopus_limbs

#2 IMO, AI is relevant but not in the way that you think. I have a feeling the CTO introduced the bug in the code by vibe-coding. Pushing code that he hasn't verified or checked, caused the bug

Rough_Union2937

This is so true. IMO entrepreneurs are going to have to figure out insurance products that protect average people. Hey whomever figures this out will be the next billionaire like a digital vault or something. From a gen xer It is ironic how the computer nerds at my high school couldn't get laid and now the cool kids mow their yards Lol

Only-Brilliant1921

But you have to hack something you initially don't know if it's there or not..... Very safe IMO

retro_grave

It's not obvious to me as a software engineer/IT specialist. There are major data breaches and CVEs published daily/weekly, long before AI were added to the process. Yes, AI is increasing the pace, but this could have been identified 6 months ago by the attacker and them quietly scanned/indexed wallets they could drain until they were confident to pull the trigger. Most vulnerabilities are in the wild for years before identified, so the timing isn't really suspect IMO.

dempsey1200

They have to be scrambling right now. Lucky that it happened to a small provider before the big ones get hit. They should be in Project Glasswing, IMO.

Raphae1

Because it is very difficult to test on the real hardware, they added a pseudo random number generator, that could be used in emulated tests. Unfortunately that weak pseudo random number generator made it into the production firmware and was by mistake used instead of the hardware true random number generator. IMO no signing device firmware code should even have a pseudo random number generator. Not even for testing purposes.

CBpegasus

No, it does not IMO. Hanlon Razor applies. As someone who works in IT and who worked in cybersecurity for years, mistakes like that happen constantly. It's not often that bad but from time to time it is. If it was an inside job it was a bad one - evidence of the vulnerability (or backdoor, if we accept "inside job") was public for years, since it was inserted to the code, and wasn't even that obfuscated. Just no one thought to audit that part of the code.