the second sort of category of things you need to consider when you're holding your
own cryptocurrencies by yourself is how will you retrieve and use it do you need a hardware
wallet do does that Hardware wallet require its own battery power or does it require a separate
device is that something that you want to have be part of a retrieval and use mechanism or do you
want it to be something that can very easily be passed on and I brought some visual aids for that
got a device here that's by elliepal called the Titan mini right it's it they say it's mini but
you know it's not tiny exactly it does have its own battery though and it can be operated without
the use of a secondary device or a computer same with the foundation devices passport too Bitcoin
only but if that describes a member of your audience it's absolutely Best in Class nothing
comes close and uh has its own battery has its own operating system has its own encrypted backup
system that would allow you to make backups make backups of your backups and store those in various
places which we'll talk about in a minute and then of course they're The Usual Suspects between
Ledger and trezor um they're they're trusted by millions they are battle tested and there's
so much documentation on how they work [Music] your cryptocurrency is at risk if you leave it
on an exchange or with any kind of centralized third party there are ways to protect your
cryptocurrency but you have to take responsibility there are a lot of questions how do I do that
where do I start well today we are joined by Seth mind your Biz he is a tech trainer former
Microsoft Google Samsung Dell besides Satoshi Nakamoto himself this is the guy to talk to to
learn everything we need to know about how best to protect your valuable cryptocurrency Seth how are
you doing today I'm doing great thank you so much I I am going to ask you to walk back that comment
about me being second only to Satoshi I think that uh Craig Wright would take exception to that
just throwing that out there Seth Seth Seth for the folks at home can you please give our audience
your background I've known you for a while but for the folks at home tell us about your Tech
background absolutely so as you mentioned before uh last major Tech Fortune 50 company that I
worked for was Microsoft and my job role there was a senior National trainer um I ushered in
the era of Windows 10 if you remember when that was all being rolled out and so in some small
way I feel responsible for all of the Telemetry and and frankly spying that these companies do
on people because I I worked with these sales people who made it seem like a convincing thing
to adopt in our lives so since that time I've really gone head first into the free and open
source software movement the digital personal identifying information encryption movement I
love what the Electronic Frontier Foundation and groups like it are doing in the space and so I
fancy myself not only a privacy Advocate but now a cryptocurrency educator and like you mentioned
a still just a tech trainer but that I've really focused on those technologies that help empower
the individual and a lot of them well they're free and open source but they're also Priceless so
yeah that's that's where I'm at now I love it so let's jump right into it I mean first of all Seth
why is self-custody so important self-custody is everything in a world where the cloud makes it
convenient to just leave all of your photos with them convenient to leave all of your
contact information with them and convenient to sometimes even write your personal Communications
like you know when you're in Gmail having an email Auto drafted for you and auto completing
your sentences if we don't watch ourselves and we don't start to take a little more accountability
for owning all these things we may find that that even our very brain power and our own identities
are being taken over by some kind of an AI or algorithm somewhere so it is in part it's being
a sovereign individual it's being a person that can grow and and has the opportunity to
make mistakes along the way too during that that growth period and that requires that you not be
canceled over making dumb mistakes or saying dumb things or maybe spending on something that you
didn't want somebody else to know that you spent something on because you view it as a mistake
and uh and yeah if we don't know how to properly take care of our own uh Speech and our own spend
then we can't have that future that's taken away from us so too much convenience is a bad thing
so I want to know how to solve custody there's so many different you know things I don't know
where to begin Seth help me understand how best I can do this All right so I'm using
a free tool at diagrams.net this is free and open source and there is a desktop application if you
wanted to just write notes like this and save it to whatever cloud storage or locally if you
felt like it this is a written out guideline and the very first step Aaron is threat modeling and
most people ask what's thread modeling well very simply it's paying attention to every
possible attack surface that you have in terms of your self-custody for cryptos right to ensure
your speech and your spending specifically um not necessarily in that order but but you're spending
with crypto and you've got to pay attention to the minute threats that are social you
may live in a place where for whatever reason people around you just view owning your own
cryptocurrency and holding your own cryptocurrency as a problem and so they may be willing to create
additional issues for you in holding your own cryptocurrencies it may be political you may
live in a territory of the world where there's a shifting landscape in the regulatory environment
and you're not really certain what that's going to look like from from one day to the next here
in the United States I think I mentioned this to Austin the last time I was on your Channel
from one day to the next we were able to recommend tornado cash without any concern at all and the
following day it was totally illegal we would have been committing a an act of treason against our
government based on the U.S treasury's mandate not to use this tool and so that can change we
need to factor that in when we're figuring out how to custody our crypto assets and then Financial
threats would be such as a bank or other lending institution any other financial services that you
interact with on a regular basis who might make your life difficult as you transition from letting
somebody else custody your crypto to holding it yourself in addition that threat model needs to
include succession planning Aaron I don't know if anyone's told you lately but um at the end I'm
going to give you a spoiler for life at the end everybody dies and yeah what there's yeah there's
no avoiding it that's a spoiler right it's like it's like if you ever watched that Titanic about
sinks in the end we all like all of our boats sink in the end and so knowing what to do with our
cryptocurrencies at the end if we're not careful we can take it with us or we can functionally do
what's called a coin burn and there are millions of Bitcoin already that have been lost because
of this people not making sure that anyone else could use their crypto after they died and having
those coins no longer be retrievable are there people that I want to make sure have access if
so who's on that short list and how do I share that with them so asking the question is the
very first step you will find Solutions there are there are many I'm not going to mention any
of those by name right now but multisig is just one that I'll mention early on partial custody
would be such as a multi-sig it may be for the purpose of wealth preservation uh vis-a-vis and
Ira or a living trust or something else where there needs to be a third party executor based
on the way that those instrument governments are set up today for other asset classes you would
need to ensure that to be compliant that you have partial custody of your cryptos with that person
or with that executor and I know it doesn't fit perfectly the ethos of the cyberpunk only the you
know Sovereign self-custody but there are some people for whom that's the only option there's
some people who have special circumstances or special needs in their family literally somebody
who may not be uh who may be aging out of their ability to custody their own their own cryptos
and so knowing how how that looks that's where compromise May been and you need to pay very close
attention in that first step of threat modeling to any potential threats in that partial custody
scheme that you choose so just know estate planning is messy in the best of circumstances
it's messy but with crypto it's actually even more difficult so so tackle those hard questions
as early as you can and have that you know be formulating that plan while you do that those
are all things that the audience at home needs to think about when doing this themselves they're
not going to get into specifics for those right here but when you're doing this yourself these
are all things you need to think about 100 and if you need to include the advice of a certified
financial planner or a certified financial advisor somebody who has those credentials by all means in
the end they're probably worth their fee go find somebody who has expertise with cryptocurrencies
and then work with them because they will save your family a lot of Heartache in the end
um Aaron I know that you've been in the space long enough that you and I both we have edge
cases and in our friends and family where there has been tragic loss of life and associated with
it tragic loss of their cryptocurrencies with no ability to take care of those who are left
behind so this is an important question to tackle early on the second sort of category of things you
need to consider when you're holding your own cryptocurrencies by yourself is how will you
retrieve and use it do you need a hardware wallet do does that Hardware wallet require its own
battery power or does it require a separate device is that something that you want to have be part of
the retrieval and use mechanism or do you want it to be something that can very easily be passed on
and I brought some visual aids for that got advice here that's uh that's by elliepal called the Titan
mini right it's it they say it's mini but you know it's not tiny exactly it does have its own
battery though and it can be operated without the use of a secondary device or a computer
same with the foundation devices passport to bitcoin only but if that describes a member
of your audience it's absolutely Best in Class nothing comes close and uh has its own battery
has its own operating system has its own encrypted backup system that would allow you to make backups
make backups of your backups and store those in various places which we'll talk about in a minute
and then of course they're The Usual Suspects between Leisure Ledger Ledger and trezor
um they're they're trusted by millions they are battle tested and there's so much documentation on
how they work that uh that it's easy to know how those will work for you but could a third party
if they needed to and they were authorized by you could they pick up that device could they use it
plan for that and then of course being able to use multiple signatures to secure your funds between
maybe yourself and a uh an executor of your estate or yourself and a trusted loved one loved one or
a family member a friend that's something you have to figure out in terms of retrieval and use
could you do this alone could you do this or could somebody else do it if you were incapacitated or
unavailable and how many people would it take so those are questions again that I don't have
a hard answer to anybody in your audience but that they'll have to ask themselves and figure out for
their situation I like it dude very helpful I think when people come in they just they hear
Ledger or treasure but they don't really think about some of this other stuff yeah it it I've I
mean part of what I do right now is I've helped in uh working with the compliance the finance and the
executive as well as operations teams of a uh of a a talent management agency that needed to custody
its own crypto and had to work with all those four departments to gain mind share in coming
up with a proper threat model and the proper procedure for accepting cryptocurrencies paying
out cryptocurrencies accounting for them this can look very different between institutions and
individuals but the questions are the same so yeah appreciate that the last part is the one that most
people jump into and like you said they're like oh cool well I see a referral Link in the description
which it's a good idea to have these tools right but they are just tools until you have a plan
and they normally jump to this one and that is your plan is really just a preemptive response
to threats and if you haven't thought through those threats you're not really working through
a plan you're just grabbing another tool you need to figure out how to use it with that plan
so yeah maybe get a hardware wallet maybe get an offline seed phrase backup it can be
a metal plate or it can be one of these resin dipped paper you know devices or it can be uh
still in folio or block yeah the stonefolio where you write in it with glow-in-the-dark
ink or something what or yeah there are so many different solutions there but again based on your
threat model you'll know what's right for you so don't get hung up on the exact like how figure out
like what you're defending against and why and then the how becomes a lot more obvious for you
um and then what I will say is these last two points Aaron these are very near and dear to
me because a lot of people they don't know it yet but they they get to that final test maybe
somebody in their life is passing away maybe they themselves don't know that they're about to to
face the ultimate test of their security model and it fails because they don't have a backup in the
data security of the infosec communities there's this joke that one equals zero and two equals one
that has to do with backups if you only had one uh one device that contained everything without a
backup then that means that if this is broken you don't have anything at all if you had two right
two wallets that mirrored the same seed phrase or that had the same information on it then all
of a sudden if you're if one gets destroyed or is missing or compromised you still have actually one
so backing up your backups is essential that's why I like for the bitcoiners in the audience that's
why I'm I'm so happy that the foundation device is uh crew send me this for evaluation and I love the
way that it works because it actually has a full backup that is encrypted so you could put this
say in a safety deposit box without concern um which brings me to the last point encryption
is not a crime at least not yet um not here in the United States it depends on no no you're if
you're a ham radio operator right if you're you're a shortwave radio operator actually encryption is
a crime don't do that like there there are some limitations to encryption just like how there's
some limitations to to free speech you can't walk into a theater and say certain things
really loud right you will get arrested um if you if you try that out can't walk into an airport
or onto an airplane and just and just Shout Whatever words you want some words will get you
forcefully ejected but with that with encryption you can take the backups of your seed phrase you
can take the backups of your wallet information and you can just know that if this fell into
somebody else's hands you could hand it straight over to whoever you you view your adversary to
be maybe it's your mother-in-law but uh hand it to your mother-in-law and she says oh finally I
have your crypto wallets okay good luck with that it's encrypted so it gives you a lot more options
for how you create those backups of your of your backups and all of a sudden what was just a very
simple security plan you now got backups of your your crypto the way that you know Voldemort has
horcruxes you're just you know you got to lock down you're good and I think that's probably the
the most important thing that I hope anybody from your audience takes away Aaron is that encryption
working from that direction up helps to protect a lot of your other plans and helps you to protect
a lot of the uh the speech that you have while you're making those plans and a little anecdote is
my my accountant used to hate me I would encrypt my tax papers right when I'm emailing with my my
accountant I mean back in 2009 2010 um because he would say like okay well this is so annoying
why do you why do you encrypt the attachment of you know these filing documents and then why do
you text me the password separately well because it's two factors of Authentication
um but I'll tell you this I've never had anyone fraudulently intervene uh with my taxes I've
never had anyone commit wire fraud on real estate that I purchased and I've never had any kind of a
major knock on wood major problem with any other Financial or cryptocurrency data of
mine because I use encryption religiously and I back up my backups and it's not a crime yet
yeah knock on wood if you do ever see anything like that like I would ask your audience just very
much consider that what you lose if you vote for any kind of a political measure that allows for
Universal back doors on encryption because things that you think should be sacrosanct right uh Love
Letters from your significant other that you want to put into a time capsule photos of your children
innocently bathing as as children that are intended just for you and and their other parent
right uh thing things that would have not even been considered controversial in an analog world
now being considered suspect and only because a third party was able to gain unauthorized access
to it I I don't want to live in that world and I don't want to live in the world like that I didn't
even think about it like that dude you're right though that's crazy you know people want to use
centralized exchanges to do trading people might want to use products like Celsius to get yield
what do you say to those people is it not worth it or how should somebody go about interacting
well I think that when it comes to high promised yield it's always very tempting but 30 of zero
is still zero and unfortunately my heart goes out to members of your audience that had their funds
locked up on Celsius but they found out the hard way that the highest available yield from any of
the pairs that they that they offered there or any of the assets that they offered staking and
interest on have resulted in zero gains so yeah it's I think we should be very suspect of anything
like this we should be very wary of any kind of a centralized yield product and any centralized
platform that claims that there's great Alpha right you know great gains available we've seen
it too many times especially in this last cycle we've been burned three times how many more times
do we need to be burned before we stop touching the hot stove of centralized yield that that's a
question I guess only you can answer true you take on the risk it's up to you do your own research
understand the risks I encourage everybody to go subscribe to Seth follow them on Twitter as well
I'll leave links to that in the description final thoughts for the altcoin daily audience
just that encryption is not a crime yet use it download free and open source tools like signal
and ask your loved ones to start using it make encryption and make privacy tools normal they're
not a crime right now and if you just use them to communicate with your loved ones then you
know the the stigma is gone it's not just for drug dealers and bad people frankly it never
was but you can help generalize it cool thanks so much for coming on today Seth my pleasure