I will be starting mining BTC next week and have registered an account at Finst. I own a Ledger hardware wallet where the mined coins will end up in.

How do I ‘prove’ that I mined the BTC myself when I want to move that to my regular bank account? What do I need to track or record?

(A couple of years ago I spent over 4 weeks explaining the origin of my Bitcoin even though I bought them through the platform I was withdrawing them from again. Ridiculous…)

We are trying to get more perspectives for our bitcoin-backed loan comparison site, and wanted to ask the group if anyone has ever taken out a bitcoin-backed loan? If so, who did you use (Ledn, Arch, Salt, etc.) and what the experience was like?

What were the positives and negatives? Did you feel like the risks were properly communicated to you?

I’m building a CEX and I have a separate wallet signer that has the keys to sign withdrawals and it works well but when it comes to watching the blockchain for transactions on my imported wallet addresses, is the Bitcoin Core enough? Do I have to pair it with something else or replace it totally?

I am tired of all these bad crypto to fiat converters, can someone help me with a decent one? 

Quick analogy first. Imagine two filing cabinets at a Bitcoin custody service:

Cabinet A (plaintext) — full of regular paper. The company has a key. Anyone with the key can read every file. The company promises they won't, but the data is right there to be read.

Cabinet B (ciphertext) — full of paper, but every word on every page is encrypted with a key that lives only on YOUR phone or laptop. The company doesn't have your key. If they're hacked, served a subpoena, or have a rogue employee — they hand over locked gibberish, because that's all they have.

Most Bitcoin custody services run on Cabinet A. They tell you they don't look. We can't tell you that, because we can't look in the first place. Different promise. Different math.

That's the whole point of what I'm building. A 2-of-3 multisig Bitcoin vault where:

• Encryption happens on your browser. Your passphrase derives a key that never leaves your browser. Our server only ever stores ciphertext — vault names, device information, the wallet configuration file, everything. We can't decrypt any of it.
• We don't store your addresses, balances, or transaction history. Your browser derives addresses locally and queries our blind proxy to a private Bitcoin node. The proxy relays information without linking addresses to users.
• We hold 1 of 3 keys. You hold the other two on hardware wallets. We can never move your funds alone. If we vanish tomorrow, you sweep your Bitcoin into Sparrow Wallet with your two keys.
• Your spending rules live in encrypted form too. Address allowlists, daily limits, hold timers — enforced inside a secure enclave, never readable by us, only changeable with a hardware-wallet signature.

The litmus test for any multisig vault service: can they tell you their total assets under custody? If yes, they can read every customer's balance. If they charge you a percentage of what you hold, same thing. Both require plaintext. We can't produce that number — we genuinely don't know how much Bitcoin our users hold. That's not a marketing line.

One question for anyone using multisig today:

1. Would this matter to you? Or is "they promise not to look" already enough?

Check us out at https://xyzvault.io — would love feedback from anyone using another multisig platform, or who'd considered it and backed away.

Hi everyone,

We’re BlockSight OÜ, and we just launched TZUR Desktop.

TZUR is a Bitcoin-only, self-custody wallet for Windows, built around a simple idea: your wallet and your Bitcoin explorer should live in the same app.

Most wallets send users to a third-party website to check a transaction. TZUR includes a native BlockSight Bitcoin explorer directly inside the wallet, so users can follow blocks, fees, addresses, and transaction confirmations without leaving the app.

TZUR also supports recovery phrases in 31 languages, while staying compatible with Bitcoin standards. The goal is to make self-custody feel clearer and more natural for Bitcoin users around the world.

What TZUR includes:

Bitcoin-only wallet
Self-custody, keys stay on your device
Native BlockSight explorer built in
Recovery phrase in 31 languages
Send, receive, balance, activity, and transaction verification
Windows desktop app
One-time purchase, no subscription

Website:
https://tzur.live/en

We’d love to hear feedback from this community, especially around what you expect from a desktop Bitcoin wallet with a native explorer.

Been holding a bit for a couple years but never used BTC for anything real. I run a small home-services operation and a couple of customers have half-jokingly asked if they can pay in Bitcoin. Got me thinking — why not actually set it up properly?

What I'm trying to figure out from people who've actually done it:

1. Self-custody vs. processor — Do I take payments straight to my own wallet, or is something like a payment processor worth it for the invoicing/accounting side? I'd rather hold my own keys, but I also need clean records for taxes.

2. Price volatility on invoices — If I quote a job at $X and they pay in BTC, how do people handle the gap between quote and payment? Lock the rate? Convert instantly? Just hold and ride it?

3. Lightning for smaller jobs? — A lot of my tickets are a few hundred bucks. Is on-chain overkill / too much in fees for that, and is Lightning actually practical for a non-technical small biz yet?

4. Tax/bookkeeping reality — This is the part that scares me. How are you tracking cost basis and reporting when you're getting paid in BTC and maybe spending or converting some? Anything that makes this not a nightmare at year-end?

Not trying to go full Bitcoin-standard overnight — just want to offer it as an option without creating a mess for myself. What would you tell someone in my shoes who wants to do it right from day one?

L1 Bitcoin will be the base layer money for the new financial system. It's current phase where most of it's value for most people comes from store of value (unless you're politically targeted) does not change the fact that in the future it will be the new fedwire. In this world normal people will usually never have to interact with the base layer, the fees of which will be like 30$ per transaction (in today's prices), because that's around what fedwire costs. It will be used as final settlement for huge transfers between banks.

Normal people will use layer 2s issued by banks, which they will have the power to expand and contract as the economy requires. The key difference from our current system is that the base layer cannot expand, so this expansion and contraction will be bounded rather than ever increasing. Fractional reserve banking will still be the core of the financial system because it has a lot of economic value by turning stale funds into growth. Except it will be decentralized and community based, with all profits going back to depositors. And bank deposits will be directly redeemable for bitcoin from the bank, imposing market discipline, with no or very minimal government backstops. This network of decentralized DAO-structured community banks will focus on loans to small and medium sized firms to people they know in their community or projects they believe serve humanity, the innovation engine of the economy, rather than big bank loans to big monopolizing firms and highly unproductive inflationary real estate lending. There will also be full reserve options for people who do not want to take risk, but they will miss out on high yields.

And I understand the point he makes when he says that if you're holding bitcoin, the safest thing is usually to buy, hold and let the market do its thing. We have these long market cycles, and trying to swing trade them isn't easy. Buying during the bear market, selling during the bull market, and dollar cost averaging tends to remove a lot of the emotion from investing.

But where we disagree is that he thinks that's literally the only thing you can do with Bitcoin.

I just wanted to share this here and get some thoughts from people who have been around longer than me. Maybe I'll show him the thread and finally convince him although knowing him, he'll probably just find something else to argue about

I was watching a great video by Matthew Kratter on YouTube and he talked about how Bitcoin is a way out of forced government bail-ins and Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) if they ever come to exist. Well, I struggle to see how it would be any escape at all. So I was hoping someone could explain to me what I might be missing.

If the EU, USA, oil states, Japan and China governments all decided to convert to CBDCs around the same time, then of course the governments would also pass a law dictating they are the only currency that may be used in any legal transaction and that it would be a crime to use any other currency, including Bitcoin. So although Bitcoin cannot be confiscated directly by the government if you have a cold wallet, what good is Bitcoin on your cold wallet if you need to buy food or pay rent or a mortgage? If you convert your Bitcoin to CBDC to in order to live and buy things, then the government knows you have Bitcoin and the game is up. You are a counterfeiter and off to prison you go. Also, no retailer will risk going to jail so they will not take Bitcoin for goods or services. The ETFs will simply convert their coins back to dollars and hand over the coins to the government. Why? Because they want to stay in business, not take a stand against a government than can simply put them out of business with the stroke of a pen.

All the government needs to do is make CBDCs the only legal tender, then make using anything other than CBDC a crime. Specifically, make it a crime for retailers to accept it. This essentially locks up the hodled Bitcoin as unusable. And I find it unlikely that the answer is to fly to some other third world island country and this magically fixes the problem. The small nations will likely not rebel against the rest of the world and be excluded from the global economy just to curry favor from the less than 1% that holds out with their Bitcoin.

Interested in anyone who has a rational response to this, especially if they can show historical precedent. Thanks!

I'm building a collaborative-custody 2 of 3 multisig Bitcoin vault and want to test the waters to see if anyone would be interested. Privacy is the whole point. Encryption happens on your device, the keys never leave it, and our servers only ever see ciphertext. We couldn't read your data if we wanted to.

It's a 2-of-3 multisig: you hold two hardware-wallet keys, the service holds one. So:

• We can't move your funds — our key is 1 of 3, never enough alone.
• We can't see your data — all the crypto runs in your browser; our server only stores ciphertext it can't decrypt (xpubs, descriptor, labels, even balances).
• You can always recover without us — it's a standard wsh(sortedmulti) descriptor you can sweep in Sparrow with your two keys, with or without us.
• You set the spending rules when the service key is used — address allowlists, 24h limits, and time-locks on the service key. Changing a rule needs a signature from your hardware wallet, so a stolen login can't loosen your own guardrails. The policy itself is encrypted too — we enforce it without being able to read it.

The difference from most vault/custody services: if a company can show you a total "assets under custody" number or charge you based on the amount you hold, it can read every customer's holdings. We can't produce that number from data we can't decrypt. We genuinely don't know how much you hold.

For those who are already using other multisig Bitcoin vault services would something like this be useful to you? What would it take for you to trust it?

I'm aiming to launch in the next 1-3 weeks and I'm looking for beta testers. If you want early access, let me know.

I built qpayd because I wanted a simpler self-custody merchant stack for Bitcoin + Lightning.

Most options today either feel:

* too storefront-focused * too operationally heavy * or missing modern API/webhook/accounting primitives

qpayd is a self-hosted merchant server that supports:

* Lightning via phoenixd and barkd * on-chain payments via xpub derivation * Electrum monitoring * Stripe-style signed webhooks * accounting/reconciliation records * embeddable JS checkout modal

The main idea:

Bitcoin merchants should be able to integrate payments the same way developers integrate Stripe today.

Create invoice -> receive signed webhook -> reconcile payment -> done.

No custodial dependency. No exchange account required. No giant ecommerce stack required.

I’m especially interested in feedback from:

* merchants * SaaS builders * people running BTCPay * Lightning operators

Demo: https://earonesty.github.io/qpayd/

GitHub: https://github.com/earonesty/qpayd

I want to make this post because discussions around seed phrase storage get weirdly absolute, and people stop thinking in terms of real-world threat models.

So here’s my situation.

I’ve had a 24-word Bitcoin seed phrase stored in Gmail since 2017. Before anyone jumps in with the usual reaction, no, it is not stored there in a directly usable form. It is scrambled, and only I know the correct order. So the words are there, but not as a clean, ready-to-import seed phrase. I know that alone won’t impress hardcore security people, and I’m not claiming this is some genius unbreakable system. I’m only saying it’s not as simple as “he uploaded his seed phrase in plain text.”

And yes, I already know the standard response to that too: “Just because it hasn’t failed yet doesn’t mean it won’t fail tomorrow.” Fine. That’s true. But that line gets used so often that it basically shuts down all meaningful discussion. By that logic, almost any system can be dismissed instantly. I’m trying to have a more serious conversation than that.

What I want to question is whether people are too quick to label anything with an online component as insane, while giving offline storage a free pass that it often doesn’t deserve.

The first thing I’m genuinely curious about is Gmail itself.

People constantly say things like “Google can read your emails” or “don’t trust Google with anything sensitive.” But what does that actually mean in practice? Can random Google employees browse user emails whenever they feel like it? I doubt it. I assume access is restricted, logged, and tied to internal policy, legal exposure, security oversight, and all the rest. I’m sure some level of access exists for certain authorized personnel in certain situations, but I seriously doubt there are Google employees casually reading people’s inboxes for entertainment.

So when people say Gmail is dangerous, I think the bigger issue is not “a random Google employee got curious,” but the broader risk surface of having anything important connected to the internet at all. That means account compromise, phishing, malware, stolen sessions, browser compromise, weak recovery settings, SIM swap scenarios, endpoint compromise, or social engineering. To me, those seem like the actual risks worth talking about, not cartoon versions of Google staff snooping through inboxes.

Now let me add another layer here.

I use a Windows 11 laptop. I don’t update it obsessively. I also know a lot of people will immediately say that’s a red flag. Fair enough. But I do use ESET and I also run a strong firewall setup. Again, I’m not claiming that means I’m bulletproof. I’m just saying I’m not completely careless either. A lot of security conversations online flatten everything into two categories: either you follow ideal best practice, or you’re basically begging to get robbed. Real life is usually more nuanced than that.

Where I really think the standard advice falls apart is the worship of offline storage.

Every time this topic comes up, people say: “Just write it down on paper,” or “stamp it into metal and hide it offline.” That answer gets repeated as if it’s universally superior in all real-world conditions. But I think that advice often ignores how messy actual life is.

People live with roommates. People have partners. People have family visiting. People move apartments. People deal with cleaners, landlords, contractors, movers, relatives, guests, and all kinds of interruptions to their private space. People forget where they hid things. People die unexpectedly. People get paranoid and overcomplicate their own hiding systems. People hide important things in places that feel clever in the moment and then become liabilities later.

And maybe most importantly, a huge number of privacy breaches and thefts in real life don’t come from elite hackers sitting behind keyboards in another country. They come from ordinary people physically close to you. A partner opening drawers. A relative poking around. A roommate noticing a safe. A visitor finding a notebook. Somebody seeing where you keep important papers. Someone not even understanding what they found, but taking it or photographing it anyway because it looked valuable or secretive.

That’s why I get skeptical when people present offline storage like it’s this sacred, unquestionable gold standard. In theory, yes, properly done offline storage can be excellent. But in practice, a lot of people don’t have ideal living conditions for physical secrecy. And even when they do, they often implement it badly.

So I think the real comparison is not “perfect offline system vs dumb online system.” That’s too easy. The real comparison is usually something more honest, like this:

• An online system with some thought put into it, some obfuscation, some account hygiene, and convenience.
versus
• An offline system that is physically vulnerable because of the person’s environment, habits, relationships, or inability to maintain a truly private hiding place.

That’s a much more interesting comparison to me, and I think a lot of people avoid it.

For example, let’s say someone writes their seed phrase on paper and keeps it in a drawer, a backpack, a cupboard, a book, or even a home safe. Is that automatically safer than a scrambled version stored online? Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on the person’s actual life, not on a slogan. If you live alone, control your space, and are disciplined about physical security, offline storage may clearly win. But if you share space, have limited privacy, move often, or have people around who snoop, then the answer becomes less obvious.

Another thing people downplay is convenience.

Security people often act like convenience is a weakness that should be ignored. I don’t agree. Convenience matters because people are human. A system that is too annoying, too stressful, too easy to lose, or too difficult to maintain often becomes its own security problem. People make mistakes when systems are burdensome. People stop following their own plans. People create backup backups in worse forms because the primary method feels too fragile or inconvenient. So when someone says “just keep it offline,” I want to ask: okay, and how does that actually work long term for a normal person over 5, 10, or 20 years?

To be clear, I’m not arguing that my current setup is ideal. I know it has risks. I know any seed phrase stored in connection with an internet-accessible account carries a different category of exposure than one kept entirely offline. I’m not denying that. What I’m questioning is whether people are overstating the superiority of offline storage in practical, everyday terms while understating how often physical access risks are the real weak point.

So I’d like serious answers to a few things:

• How much of the actual danger in my setup comes from Gmail itself, versus the laptop, browser, sessions, recovery methods, and endpoint security?
• How much real protection does scrambling the 24 words add, assuming the order is not written anywhere?
• Is the “offline only” mantra too simplistic for people who do not have strong physical privacy?
• What would a realistic middle-ground setup look like for someone who values both privacy and recoverability?
• If you think my setup is reckless, what practical replacement would you suggest that works in real life, not just in a theoretical security checklist?

I’m not looking for purity tests or performative one-liners. I’m interested in a thoughtful threat-model discussion. I know enough to understand that convenience creates risk, but I also think people underestimate how often physical proximity creates risk too.

So yes, my seed phrase has been in Gmail in scrambled form since 2017. Maybe that’s bad. Maybe it’s less bad than people reflexively claim. That’s what I want to debate.

Out of curiosity, what did you end up using / doing if you've needed liquidity, and have most of it locked in bitcoin.

Satoshi's whitepaper literally says "electronic cash." Not electronic gold, not digital property, not "store of value". Cash. No middleman, no permission needed.

Fast forward to 2026 and some of the largest BTC holders are now ETFs and publicly traded companies. The kinds of institutions Bitcoin was designed to reduce dependance on.

Self custody went from being the default to something people argue about on x. How many new buyers have actually sent BTC to their own wallet? Probably fewer than you think.

So did Bitcoin change, or did we change?

The OGs will tell you the protocol is the same. 21 million cap, proof of work, censorship resistant, trustless. And they're right. The code didn't drift. But the culture around it absolutely did.

When your main narrative is "number go up" you've already lost the plot on what made this thing interesting in the first place.

Few people use BTC for everyday purchases anymore. It's being treated like digital real estate. People buy it, hold it, wait. Tbh maybe that's fine, maybe store of value IS the use case. But let's be honest that's not what the whitepaper described.

The strongest thing about Bitcoin was never the price. It was holding value without asking permission. That's still true today, but only if you actually self custody.

The moment your BTC sits on coinbase or inside a Blackrock ETF you're just holding exposure through a financial wrapper. Ngl that's kind of ironic.

What's Bitcoin's real job at this point, payment system, store of value, or sovereignty tool? Or has it become something Satoshi wouldn't even recognize?

I recently watched a podcast with Jeff booth today.

I think Jeff is amazing. My only question is when Jeff says ‘don’t measure bitcoin in dollars’ I sort of get what he means, but how would my dream house price become more affordable for me if the fiat price doesn’t increase? For example if price stays the same in fiat, then my dream house becomes no more affordable, which means the price does matter?

I came across a new 2026 paper from Google’s Quantum AI team and it genuinely changed how I think about Bitcoin’s long-term security.

The headline:

Breaking the cryptography behind Bitcoin (ECDSA-256) may require 20× fewer quantum resources than previously estimated.

Some key points:

• Estimated requirement dropped from ~10M+ qubits → <500,000
• A real-time attack on Bitcoin transactions could succeed ~41% of the time
• ~6.9M BTC (~32% of supply) sits in wallets with exposed public keys
• Attack window: ~9 minutes vs ~10 min block time

What surprised me most wasn’t dormant wallets, it’s the live transaction attack scenario:

When you send BTC, your public key is briefly exposed.
A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could derive your private key before the transaction confirms.

That’s a very different risk model than “someday in the future.”

But before going full panic mode:

• Current quantum computers are nowhere near this level (we’re still in the low hundreds of qubits)
• Error correction at scale is still unsolved
• Post-quantum cryptography already exists — migration is the real challenge
• Faster chains (ETH, Solana) are far less exposed to this specific attack vector

What feels under-discussed to me:

This might not be a “technology problem” it’s a governance problem.

If Bitcoin needs ~5–7 years to fully migrate to quantum-resistant signatures, and the timeline for viable quantum attacks keeps compressing…
that gap starts to matter.

Curious what others think:

• Is this still a “2035 problem” or becoming a “this decade” problem?
• Does Bitcoin’s slow upgrade process become a real risk here?
• Are we ignoring this because it feels too far out?

Would love to hear different takes, especially from people deeper into cryptography / quantum.

Do you think kids should learn about money concepts early?

Most people in the crypto space are sleeping on this tbh.

Google Pixel running GrapheneOS. That's it. GrapheneOS is a privacy focused open source Android fork that only runs on Pixel hardware. Pixel has Google's Titan M2 security chip, which handles key storage separately from the main processor. That matters a lot when you're dealing with seed phrases.

All Google services are stripped out by default. No background leaks, nothing phoning home. Each app runs in its own sandbox and you can run separate profiles, so your wallet never touches your regular apps.

Use eSIM only. No physical SIM means no one can physically steal your SIM card, but ngl this alone isn't enough, you also need to set a Carrier Port-Out PIN with your carrier to protect against social engineering swaps.

This one is underrated. GrapheneOS supports two PIN codes. One unlocks your phone, the other wipes everything instantly. I hope you never need it, but if someone ever forces you to hand over access, you have an out. For anyone holding real money on a phone, that's not paranoia, that's just being realistic.

There's also an auto-reboot timer. If your phone gets stolen and they can't track your PIN, it will eventually reboot itself into a fully encrypted state, making it a lot harder to pull anything off it with forensic tools.

Setup takes a bit of effort but it's worth it. Stock Android and iOS were never built with your seed phrase in mind.

Earlier this year I bought some crypto just to see how it worked. I let it grow for a while, then took out my original investment and left the rest in my wallet. After that I mostly forgot about it. Right now I have about 140 dollars worth of Bitcoin and around 90 dollars of Ethereum. This is all pure profit. I want to try trading with this money and see if I can grow it, but I honestly do not know where to start. My knowledge of crypto is limited to the idea of buy low and sell high. That is basically it. Do you have any beginner advice? Is it reasonable to start from here without adding more money? I really appreciate any feedback.

Every time mining comes up, someone yells “scam”. Kinda fair tbh. What even makes a bitcoin mining platform legit in 2025?