In this episode, McIntosh and Kenshin tackle one of Bitcoin's most critical aspects: proper seed phrase backup strategies. They explore various backup methods from basic pen-and-paper solutions to advanced metal stamping and creative approaches like hiding seed phrases in books. The hosts discuss essential security practices including backup redundancy, geographic distribution, inheritance planning, and advanced setups like multisig and Shamir's secret sharing. They also cover common costly mistakes, from digital storage mishaps to house fires, emphasizing why summer is the perfect time to audit and upgrade your backup systems based on your Bitcoin holdings.
Stick around to the very end for the v4v track, “Cyperpunks Not Dead” by Electrobadour.
Resources
https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/bip-0039-wordlists.md
Bitcoin Price at Time of Recording
August 1st, 2025: 117,800 USD | 102,490 EUR
Block Height at Time of Recording
907,847
Episode Page
https://satoshis-plebs.com/episode-220
Music Credits
Electrobadour
Cyperpunks Not Dead
Website
https://satoshis-plebs.com
Podcasting 2.0 Apps available at http://podcastapps.com and Value4Value information page available here: https://value4value.info
McIntosh can be reached by email at [email protected] and on Twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. His mastodon handle is @[email protected] and his Nostr. Kenshin can be reached on Twitter at @kenshin_ninja or on Nostr. Kenshin’s email is [email protected]. You can also follow the Satoshi’s Plebs podcast account on Nostr. We are looking forward to hearing from you!
We are looking forward to hearing from you!
[00:00:00]
McIntosh:
Welcome back to Satoshi's Plebs for episode two twenty. I'm Macintosh.
[00:00:06] Kenshin:
And I am Ken Shin. Yeah. And today we're sorry. Yes. And today we're tackling one of the most critical aspects of Bitcoin's of custody
[00:00:16] McIntosh:
that often gets overlooked until it's too late, seed phrase backups. Whether you're new to Bitcoin or you've been stacking for years, properly backing up your seed phrase is literally the difference between financial sovereignty and losing everything forever.
[00:00:31] Kenshin:
And with summer here and a bit more time on our hands, there's no better opportunity to audit our backups. Maybe you've been putting off that metal backup upgrade or you know you need to distribute your copies better.
[00:00:46] McIntosh:
Alright. I am so happy to have you back. Yeah. Happy to be back. As I've said every time everyone's like I miss you. Oh, man. I did not realize, the dynamic, I guess, until you were until you've been off for a few weeks. So Yeah. Very, very glad to have you back. But, what's been going on with you? I think you've you've been busy. Yeah. I'm in the summer vacations. So that's been,
[00:01:14] Kenshin:
good. It's been very sunny. Unusual for Sweden and for July. So that's been very good. I have been much outside, to be honest. I've been clothing a lot, fighting. Clothing. Yeah. Fighting, actually, with Claude a lot and getting frustrated until 3AM most days. But we are getting close to my project with my wife to be hopefully live maybe this week, I hope, end of this week. So that that's exciting.
[00:01:50] McIntosh:
So what I'm hearing is that the honeymoon with Claude is over. Oh, yeah.
[00:01:56] Kenshin:
Yes. And I'm afraid it's not only my fault. I think he's getting worse and worse. We talked a bit about it behind the scenes. I I think it's overloaded and they tweak the settings down so he's not so smart as he used to be, literally.
[00:02:13] McIntosh:
I need the smart version, man.
[00:02:16] Kenshin:
Yeah. I started using Opus, which is very expensive, but it feels a bit more smart, actually. It makes a difference.
[00:02:25] McIntosh:
That's the whole idea, I think. It's a bigger, dataset, whatever. Yeah. Yep. And you? Alright. So I've been doing cloud a bit on my own as well, aside from trying to hold the showdown, maybe unsuccessfully, since we didn't have any supporters this week.
[00:02:45] Kenshin:
But I I was jealous of of the last episode. That was really good with Andreas. Yeah. We had a great interview,
[00:02:52] McIntosh:
with the guy from from bit bit safe bitcoin. Bitcoin. Bitcoin safe. Safe.org. He's a great guy. Glad I got to talk to him. I I meant what I said last week. I'm going to I think I'm for maybe a winter project, I'm gonna go ahead and implement that and look at using it as the backup for kind of the family. You know, I I do I kinda do the uncle Jim thing for some very close family members. So I think this might provide a good model for that. I'm
[00:03:31] Kenshin:
Alright. When I when I heard the Nostr integration, I got really excited, and I think I I will try it very soon, actually. I like the you can back up your labels and stuff.
[00:03:42] McIntosh:
This is
[00:03:43] Kenshin:
really good solutions.
[00:03:45] McIntosh:
So I have been working on a new website for us. I did wanna report about this. So this is where I've been using Claude. And for the most part successfully. Although I am experiencing some of the same things that you are, but I'm really excited about our new website. I'm almost done. I was hoping to have it done today, but, the meat grinder of work got in the way again. And, but I basically, I'm bringing in there's over 200 pages of WordPress, and I'm bringing into Hugo, which is a static website. But it it will be much faster than the old WordPress site, which is good. Yeah. But it also supports markdown, and it basically, we will be able to push codes, well, markdown straight up to GitHub, and it will automatically, get populated and work. It will be Right. I I think it will really improve our workflow.
So I'm really looking forward to that. Yeah. I fully support the this decision with Hugo. I I used a few years. It's it's really nice. Very, very fast. Very simple. So we'll basically just take the notes that we've got and push them up and and walk away. You know? It'll it'll be nice. So Yeah. Because that is one of the things that I have to do. And frankly, I'm gonna stop doing it because I do believe this would be the last week we would even post there. But as part of my episode release process, I push up to Fountain, and then I turn around and I go and make a web page. You know, I clone it and then I update it. And it's not a big deal, but it's just another thing you've got to do.
And so, anyways, Yeah. Hopefully, we'll have good news on that. So as I mentioned, honestly, we didn't have any support this week. No idea why. I don't know. Just one of these things. Summer. Yep. Yeah. I think in general, across the board, the podcast support is down. I mean, I I don't know if it's the economy. It does tend to be somewhat seasonal seasonal, I have noticed. And by the way, we're it's been almost speaking of almost four years.
[00:06:06] Kenshin:
It's crazy. Congratulations. Yeah.
[00:06:09] McIntosh:
I thought that was pretty cool. It was like August 21, I think, was episode one of 2021. So it's been a bit, we have and maybe we'll I we'll save that for that episode or the one nearest to it. It's been a bit, and we've changed a lot. But, yeah, it's good stuff. Nice. I've learned a few
[00:06:31] Kenshin:
things. Yeah.
[00:06:34] McIntosh:
Lessons learned portal on that website in a month. Yeah. We can do that. I was thinking more along the lines of I learned a few things like how to program Hugo, but okay. Sure. We'll do that. And and ignore other coins. Well, that yeah. No. I know that's what you're talking about. Stop bringing up my past, can't you? Come on. It's Bitcoin only podcast. Oh, and I did wanna say one other thing. In the last few weeks, since you've been gone, I've I've had the meetup, my local meetup, and, frankly, we had a good time. It was interesting because, believe it or not, I walked in and we meet at a restaurant.
And I sit down and I look across the table, and, there was a person there that I had not seen in a long time. I don't know exactly, because I've seen them around town once or twice, but, frankly, it's been thirty years since we had regular contact with them. And they showed up at the meetup. And they seem to be genuinely interested. They may be listening to the podcast. To say that they were a little confused when they heard my name is probably an understatement. I had to explain to them later because, of course, I use a a non diploma. What do they call it? It's something else.
NIM. Suda NIM? Yeah. Because I just I don't know. Just we've talked about that before. But yeah. She's they're like, what? Wait. But they were good sport, and we had a good conversation afterwards. I I talked to him for a couple of minutes, and, yeah, yeah, it was a good meeting. But that was just kinda funny. And I think over time, this is what's gonna happen. People are going to come on board because they're ready. This is just a natural process. You know? Right.
[00:08:37] Kenshin:
Yeah. That's what I realized too. They they're coming when they're ready. I had family friends come on their own eventually.
[00:08:44] McIntosh:
So that's Yeah. I was I was very happy to see them. I think they will, they'll do very well. Alright. What are we talking about this week?
[00:08:55] Kenshin:
You know how it is. It's summer. You're thinking. You have more time on your hands. What to do? No, you don't. I'm sorry.
[00:09:04] McIntosh:
Most people do have more time on their hands. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:09:09] Kenshin:
I see Mike in touch. No, he said like, no, I don't. Yeah. But, for me, it's been like that. Like, oh, yeah. I I have time now. I need to fix my backups. I need to stamp a seed, you know, a metal plate or something, or where do I hide them? So I thought it's interesting to to see and talk about the different ways to back up a good phrase and, how to manage that situation. And, yeah, maybe we
[00:09:38] McIntosh:
we help each other a bit. Let's do it.
[00:09:43] Kenshin:
Yes. So if we start, first of all, for anyone who doesn't know, I don't think there is anyone now out there, at least in our podcast. Right? But what is a seed phrase? Well, a seed phrase is 12 or 16 or 24 or now different, wallets give you different amount of words, but usually it's 12 or 24 words that, basically, that's your backup to your wallet. And if your wallet, yeah, is deleted or or whatever, then you can restore that wallet again with those 12 or 24 words.
[00:10:24] McIntosh:
These could be viewed as the keys, essentially, to your to your wallet. Yeah. That that's
[00:10:31] Kenshin:
yeah. Most importantly, that's actually the key to your wallet. Mhmm. And and the actual wallet doesn't do anything. Right. It only shows you what those keys which addresses are represented by those keys. Okay. If you don't have those keys, the wallet is useless. And those keys are are what you sign the transactions with. And you you prove that that Bitcoin that is publicly visible Mhmm. That it belongs to you. You have the sign in keys. So the the seed phrase is the most important part in your setup, I would say. Okay. So that's why that is, so important or that's why it matters so much how to back it up and how to to manage it, essentially. Right? Okay.
And, there is the so called beep 39. So if anyone is curious to know where those words come from, there is the beep, b I p 39, list of words. Is 2,048 words. And it's a specially curated list of words, actually, because no two words in that list start with the same four characters. Okay. Alright.
[00:11:57] McIntosh:
So So that makes it difficult to, like, mix them up.
[00:12:02] Kenshin:
Yeah. Mhmm. Exactly. And you can always use the first four letters of each words
[00:12:08] McIntosh:
to restore a wallet. You don't even have to use the whole word, actually. So you okay. I Yeah. Learned something new right there. I did not know that. Yeah. But that makes sense. If they are unique, then yeah. Yeah. So a lot of thought went into those words.
[00:12:25] Kenshin:
Yes. A lot. And, many backup, tools that we will talk about, they they tell you you can only, backup the first four letters and it's enough. So you don't even have to write down the full words if you don't want to.
[00:12:44] McIntosh:
I am trying to find the actual BIP 39 and I cannot. It just brings up too many links.
[00:12:51] Kenshin:
I can send to you. It's on GitHub. Yeah. And the most interesting part is, there are lists for multiple languages. So I just sent it to you. Okay. And then there is an English list, of course. There's Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, French, Italian, Czech, and Portuguese. Cool.
[00:13:16] McIntosh:
And you can actually mix those up as we were talking about before.
[00:13:21] Kenshin:
Right? Yes. That's I I never tried it. I want to actually try it. I because you have those 2,048 words in each list. So every word, let's say, the tenth word in English is, let's say, car. I don't know which one it is, but let's say it's car. So that tenth word represents the tenth word in the dictionary. Mhmm. So if you go to another language and you take that tenth word, it should, it represents the same, how is it called? Cold, let's say, the same beat beat in the sequence.
[00:13:58] McIntosh:
Right. So you you use it based on what number word it is. Yeah. I looked here. So actually, the very first word in English is abandoned. Okay? Right. If you go to French, it's not the first word. It's abecer. I hope I said that right. The second word is actually whatever French how you say abandon.
[00:14:27] Kenshin:
Yeah. But if you change the first English word in your seed phrase for the first French words. Yeah. Oh, because it's alphabetical.
[00:14:36] McIntosh:
A I a b a I s s e r comes before a b a n d o n. See what I'm saying? That fourth character
[00:14:46] Kenshin:
interest alphabetical. Within their list, they're alphabetical. But but you should you can substitute the the first word of one list to the first word of the other and it should restore.
[00:14:56] McIntosh:
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. That's interesting. So next time, instead of abandon, I'll put abbeser and it'll confuse everybody and it'll be great. Yeah. Exactly.
[00:15:07] Kenshin:
Yeah. So I I would like to make one, that has a mix of those. Mhmm. So it it's not obvious at the beginning. It's like, what is that mix of different words in different languages? So maybe that's a good I suggest that when you do that, you start with all of your Bitcoin savings. Yes. Do that. Maybe not. But don't come to us. Okay.
[00:15:29] McIntosh:
So let's talk about some of the misconceptions about these seed phrases. And you already mentioned this that, for example, the hardware wallet, we because we call it a wallet and then we associate that well, I have a wallet. I carry money around. Well, surely the hardware wallet, in this case, it holds your Bitcoin. No. It doesn't. No. The hardware wallet is just holding the keys that are used to access that Bitcoin. The Bitcoin is out there. It's it's addresses on the blockchain. That's it.
[00:16:04] Kenshin:
Right? Yeah. Exactly. And that's why the software is very important because it it holds the key. And whoever has the key can send and receive your Bitcoin. Yeah.
[00:16:17] McIntosh:
Okay.
[00:16:18] Kenshin:
And, yeah. But rule number one of backup, never ever store the seed phrase
[00:16:27] McIntosh:
digitally. Wait. Kenshin? You mean, I can't put it on this picture here and send it? I just ran a picture, but, you know, and send it. No? Not a good idea.
[00:16:40] Kenshin:
Please don't. No. As we know, every software gets hacked eventually, one way or another. So you don't want your seed phrase to be
[00:16:48] McIntosh:
Right. Visible to someone. And that's iCloud. I mean, a lot of people don't think about this. You you don't need to have it on your phone in any form Mhmm. Really, in my opinion. Whether that's your little notebook or taking a picture of a piece of paper with your phone that has your seed phrases on it. I have heard of people getting hacked that way. It does happen. Yeah. It's certainly accessible. Well, they say it's not, but I would say it's accessible by Apple, if not hackers who get into Apple's setup. So
[00:17:28] Kenshin:
Yeah. Could be a bad actor within Apple. Who knows? Or wherever. I mean, people suggest also no password managers. That's also good because we think as passwords managers, it's very secure, but still, that's also software. And the password manager might be secure, but the browser that you load it through might not or you never know. Some sort of, key logger or anything really. I mean, I heard actually, recently, I heard the printer driver that was malicious. Reported that. And it was I remember that. Yeah. So, I mean, there are crazy scenarios out there that, can be become reality and steal your Bitcoin in that way. So better not to use anything digital.
And when you write down your seed phrase, not to have any cameras nearby that's I don't know. Maybe,
[00:18:29] McIntosh:
you know, what happens sometimes. You can't be too you cannot be too careful. And you just kinda need to think that through. I know we live our lives digitally, and this is digital money, obviously, but this is one case where you don't wanna be digital, most likely. Right?
[00:18:48] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what do we do then? Mhmm. Yeah.
[00:18:53] McIntosh:
What are so like, what's the cheapest what's the easiest, cheapest way to do this?
[00:18:58] Kenshin:
Yeah. I mean, the easiest way is a piece of paper and a pen, I would say. Okay. That's the easiest. So and it's accessible, and it can be temporary until you get a better backup solution. And, of course, we say always never put a lot of money initially when you make a new wallet. So that's the easiest. Just take a piece of paper, a pen, not a pencil. Right? And just write those 12 words or 24 words down. Because the pencil will fade? Yes. The pencil will fade. Makes sense. What I did for my first time, actually, or my first good setup, of course, the first time, I I think I put it on the computer. Right? As we all did.
But the first time I bought a new wallet, a new hardware wallet Mhmm. Cold storage, my first backup of that wallet was on, I bought a special notepad that was waterproof. So it was paper, but water resistant. Right. And I tested it. So indeed it didn't dissolve it with water. And I took a pen, how are they called this? A permanent pen. Right. And I did a test. I wrote on it. I watered it a lot and, yeah. It survived the test. Of course, it doesn't survive fire. Right. Which then is the next step. So the first step is paper any way or form, but then you need to the more money you put into that wallet, the more you have to lose.
Then you need to advance the the backup to something like a metal Mhmm. Piece of, yeah, a metal plate and stamp on it, the seed phrase.
[00:20:47] McIntosh:
Can I add one little caveat to that? I would argue that as long as it makes economic sense at all almost that you really probably need to move faster even if you only have a couple $100 of Bitcoin because you may only have a couple $100 of Bitcoin now. But if you think in the long term, as we've talked about all the time on this show, you don't know what that's gonna be worth in ten years. And if I say, well, it's only a couple $100, I'm just gonna keep it on paper. And, you know, I only have one copy and it's not in my safe and wow.
You may be throwing away a lot of money in the long term. You know? You're not gonna retire on a couple $100 most likely, but, but it could be significant. I mean, it could be Yeah. In in a long enough time frame. Right? So something to think about.
[00:21:51] Kenshin:
Yep. Yeah. And it's good when you have the time to go through the full way and get the metal plate and do the whole stamping thing. Other people do steel washers. You know, those washers you put between a screw and, whatever you're screwing on, and they stamp there on on this type of those rings, and then they put a bolt and a nut or somehow a lock in the whole thing. So
[00:22:20] McIntosh:
So so I've seen examples of this online. This is not something I've ever done, but you you you buy the parts, which they really would be cheap. But then you're stamping on that, washer. Right? So you have to buy the this and is the stamp letters or is it, like, some other way of signify?
[00:22:44] Kenshin:
No. No. It is the same stamps that you would use on a metal plate. You you but you need a little tool and you can three d print that. Really? To Okay. Yeah. To position the the washer and position the the stamp the stamps. And then you move it around so it really helps. That's interesting. Yeah. There are a few models online for free that you can download and print three d print or you can buy a kit ready made that are also cheap. But then, yeah, whoever you buy from and that's another thing wherever you buy from I I I don't want to buy a Bitcoin backup steel kit.
I prefer to buy on my own a metal plate from this place, a stamping tool from that place, you know, nothing associated with Bitcoin. I buy, like, a random plate metal plate from AliExpress, for example. And the stamping kit that is made to stamp, you know, whatever the those artistic uses. Right? It's not nothing that says Bitcoin. So the seller doesn't know that I am backing up a Bitcoin seed phrase. That's good. And that's also interesting. For example, on Amazon, of course, I have bought Bitcoin books. So Amazon knows I'm into Bitcoin. But yeah. So at some point, of course, you need to leak that information somewhere, but it's it's good to be mindful. Okay.
Do you have any other ways to back up? I mean, there are some products.
[00:24:29] McIntosh:
I don't want to mention any specific ones, but There are commercial products, and, for good reasons, I don't think we need to really get into those. No. I think just doing it on paper of some kind or a sheet of metal or the steel washers, that's kind of that's the three basic ways of doing it. It kind of covers everything, to be honest, for physical backups like that.
[00:24:55] Kenshin:
I have one more way. Some hardware wallets, they they generate their own backup that you can store on an SD card, for example. It is digital, but it's cold. Sure. Because, the wallet's cold storage. The SD cards, yeah. You take it. Right. Yeah. It never touches something online, let's say.
[00:25:24] McIntosh:
That makes sense. My concern with that would be ten years from now, is that SD card still good? Not that you you can I'm sure you'll be able to load it in terms of you can even if we moved on to another format, there'll still be adapters or whatever. But the Mhmm. Card itself, I've had CDs that have gone bad over time. I've had hard drives that have gone bad over time, floppy disk. All of this media eventually breaks down for whatever reason that it is. It doesn't matter why it does happen, and it doesn't take very many bits flipping, so to speak, in your little SD card to render that useless. Yeah. I agree. So yes. Be careful about that if you're if that's going to be your process.
[00:26:20] Kenshin:
Yeah. And and if you have it part of the processes yeah. It shouldn't be the only part of the process. And I would say if you do do that, there are the so called, SD cards that are industrial grade. So if you search for industrial SD card, then those are supposed to last more years Right. Higher temperatures and water and yeah. So I I got a couple of those, for example, for that reason.
[00:26:51] McIntosh:
Yeah. I I do wanna say this, and you have this here. Regardless of what process you choose to utilize, when you get done making your backup, you need to test it.
[00:27:08] Kenshin:
Yeah. Right?
[00:27:11] McIntosh:
You like, you give an example here. Oh, you're making a new wallet or whatever. You wanna put $5 worth of Bitcoin in it and then back that up and restore that before you put $5.00 $0.00 worth of Bitcoin. I think that was 50,000.
[00:27:29] Kenshin:
It's a million zeros. Right.
[00:27:32] McIntosh:
Well, our money's almost worthless, so there's gotta be a lot of zeros.
[00:27:37] Kenshin:
Yes.
[00:27:38] McIntosh:
Right? Because that's something that you don't wanna mess up.
[00:27:45] Kenshin:
Right. Yeah. That's very important.
[00:27:48] McIntosh:
Yes. And then what do you do after you have backed up your seed phrase? Where do you Well, any good DBA would tell you that you need to store it somewhere, and you need to think about that.
[00:27:59] Kenshin:
Right. And usually, you need more than one backup. Right?
[00:28:04] McIntosh:
That is a good standard practice. Yes. It's called redundancy, and, it's multiple copies.
[00:28:12] Kenshin:
Yeah. And that's the stage I am now actually personally and that's my personal summer project with my wife is to figure out where to put the backups. Because right now, we're doing the exact opposite of what you should never do, is store your backups in the same spot.
[00:28:31] McIntosh:
That sounds like a really needed summer project for you.
[00:28:35] Kenshin:
Yep.
[00:28:37] McIntosh:
Alright. So we don't keep them all in one location, and that's going to vary depending on the person. Maybe, for example, you keep one at your parents' house and you keep one at your house, or a safe in another location, or a bank deposit box in another location. I have said in the past on here, one with your lawyer. I'm not sure that that's a really good idea, but I guess it's a possibility. Maybe depending on the backup. And we're gonna talk about some multisig backups here in just a second. If it's a multisig backup, they cannot recover your funds with just a single key. So that's that's safer.
[00:29:27] Kenshin:
Yeah. Then that's a tricky part. And, yeah, we can talk about it soon. Yeah. Maybe you got multiple houses. I don't know.
[00:29:34] McIntosh:
Maybe you got a summer house, you know, whatever. I mean, what whatever works for you. Everybody's got different situations, but you do want multiple backups because things happen.
[00:29:45] Kenshin:
Yeah.
[00:29:46] McIntosh:
And things that we don't even like to think about, fire, flood. You know, there was just an earthquake, by the way, off the coast of Russia, and it was apparently a pretty bad one. And there are lots of chaos and lots of, you know, stuff. The area where I live in, no no earthquakes, knock on wood. But maybe we have hurricanes, for example. Right? Right. And so you got to think through these things. How are you gonna deal with that?
[00:30:23] Kenshin:
Yeah. And then there is, of course, how secure it is a place versus how accessible is a place where you store it. Some people I heard that might put it in a even in a safe deposit box in a bank. Mhmm. But can you access that if need be, on a weekend? No? No. You cannot.
[00:30:45] McIntosh:
And I that's probably not a problem, to be honest, if it's actual true cold storage for your Bitcoin. You shouldn't have to access it on a weekend. Right. Yeah. But Yeah. You should But it is something. I mean, it's valid either way, really. Right? But you're paying for that as well. I mean, I don't know what those things are. And maybe with the amount of Bitcoin we're talking about, it doesn't matter. But, you know, there's a cost there.
[00:31:19] Kenshin:
Yeah. And a trust.
[00:31:22] McIntosh:
Well, let's I so I'm glad you ended it that way because so the next way of doing this well, this isn't really about multi sig. That's later. Sorry. Never mind. Well, no. This is like a multi. Talk about this. What what do you mean by this? This two or three approach?
[00:31:41] Kenshin:
The it is a yeah. It is a multi sig type of thing. Oh oh, no. Or it's it's also a Shamir's secret sharing, I would say. So you can split your seed phrase to three pieces, for example, with this technique called Shamir secret sharing. And, you need, let's say, two of the three pieces. Or you can split it in five and you need three of those pieces. And you can choose in the software when you do that. You can choose how many pieces you split it and how many pieces you need to recover it.
[00:32:16] McIntosh:
Right. And the important part, so the thing that protects you, say, in the case of the bank, safety deposit. They even if you just have two or three, they're only gonna have one copy. One part, I should say. And therefore, they cannot recover that password, those seed phrases.
[00:32:37] Kenshin:
Yeah. Exactly. And and if I would give one to a family member in another country, I don't know. They might lose it or it might fall in the wrong hands somehow. So you don't want that piece to be the full key that they can restore the whole wallet. So it's it's best in some way when you distribute your key geographically in places that you don't have control, it's best that it's not a full key. So you can do that as a multisig, so it's multiple separate keys that are needed to unlock the wallet or if it's a key split in multiple ports, but is essentially the same result.
This is a bit more advanced but I would say it feels more and more necessary to do especially if you have an amount that you feel it's significant now or in future terms? Yeah. I think
[00:33:37] McIntosh:
so one of the recent news items is, for example, they're making changes so that four zero one k's can hold Bitcoin. It's the way I understand it. And that is literally a multitrillion dollar market here in The United States. I'm not saying everyone with a four zero one k is gonna convert over to Bitcoin. However, this does mean, for example, that there's a lot more capital that is available, and people are going to start having there are some people, not maybe not the average person, but there are some people who are gonna have significant amounts of capital money in Bitcoin.
And so you don't you do need to think about these things. Right? You need to think about how can I split all this up and make sure that things are safe and whatever? Or the alternative is you turn it over to somebody like Fidelity and let them deal with it, and then you depend on them. And I will direct you to any number of hacks that resulted in the loss of Bitcoin. And then there's a recovery process, and it can take years. I think at this point, Mt. Gox is finally resolved, but it's been a decade. And I'm at the point in my life when a decade's a long time and not really what I wanna go through. You know what I mean?
Right. Yep. So hope that helped. Alright. Yep. What else?
[00:35:23] Kenshin:
Another part since we're talking about distributing and some of those advanced techniques, I would say, how do you deal with inheritance planning? Right? Because the more advanced you do it, if you do a multisig or Shamir's, secret sharing. I mean Right. How do your better half or some other part of your family recover this? And so I don't know. There are many ways to do it, of course. But the way you yeah. You need to plan for it in one way or another. And for me personally, the only planning I have done so far is just to teach my wife to do Right. To do it. To reco to recover the seed phrase.
[00:36:05] McIntosh:
You're ahead of a lot of people if you've done that. I think there's a lot of people probably, frankly, who haven't even left written instructions, and they have to if they're gone, then their family has to figure it out. And what if they don't know the password? What if they don't know what computer it's on? What if they're not computer savvy? My suggestion would be you better have some good instructions. Where do you leave those instructions? Are they in a safe? You know, I mean, you have to think about multiple layers. Now you could leave it with your lawyer saying, you know, don't open unless there's a valid death certificate presented to you.
Again, you're trusting that lawyer, but it is certainly something that you could do. And if they don't if it's sealed and they don't know what's inside of it, then, you know, the the the family would be present. So you would presume at that point that everything would be okay, but you are placing some level of trust in that lawyer. For one thing, they're gonna stick it on a shelf in their law office. What happens if they have a fire? These are all crazy, morbid, wild things, but but life happens. I mean, this is just the stuff that does actually happen over a long enough time frame.
[00:37:32] Kenshin:
Yeah. And that opens a much bigger discussion that I don't think we have time, but this inheritance planning and how you do it properly,
[00:37:41] McIntosh:
I think we can dedicate an episode to that because that interests me too in personal level how to do it. And I don't wanna promote other businesses. I don't have any Bitcoin on them. I don't know. I don't know. But there are businesses out there that help you prepare for inheritance of Bitcoin. That's essentially one of their products. Do your own research, blah blah blah. Not really what I would recommend, but it is a possibility. Yeah. Fair enough? Yeah.
[00:38:17] Kenshin:
Yeah. Let's see. Before we jump to the more fun stuff, there is another one I would like to talk about. How how do you deal with physical risk of of, yeah, someone trying to rob your house or something? And there is a couple of good ways. Of course, you you hide
[00:38:40] McIntosh:
your wallets. We call those guns, Kenshin. I know that, in Europe, y'all are not not familiar with those. I'm just kidding. I had to throw it in there. It was the obvious redneck thing to say. Yeah.
[00:38:53] Kenshin:
But that was a good one. It's a decoy wallet.
[00:38:57] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:38:58] Kenshin:
So you can have a Yeah. I like this. Yeah. So a seed phrase that is has a little bit of Bitcoin in there, just enough to make it reasonable. Plausible. I don't know. A thousand dollars maybe, or 500 or whatever. And that's it. And, just say, yeah. That's all I have. Here's, backup and here's everything. And I know there are hardware wallets and even software wallets that supports this function. So if you put a secondary code on the hardware wallet Yes. It opens up the decoy wallet. So you can prove that, yes, indeed, here is the seed phrase, and that's the the hardware wallet or the software wallet, and here are the funds, and everything works like normal. And then it auto distracts after, yeah, they have some mechanism.
Mhmm. So those are really good backup of the backup, let's say, solution. Okay. But that also needs time. That's also a summer project, I would say, to really sort this whole flow down and put it down and make it look credible.
[00:40:05] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:40:08] Kenshin:
Yes. Any questions so far?
[00:40:10] McIntosh:
I'm hanging in there. Okay. I'm a little low energy today. I'm sorry. I've not gotten sleep for two nights in a row, at least not very much. So but, no, this is great. This is great. What else we got?
[00:40:26] Kenshin:
There is a fun way to back up a a seed phrase that I I would also like to try. You take a book.
[00:40:35] McIntosh:
I saw this.
[00:40:36] Kenshin:
Yeah. And you you find the words in the book, and then you find the system. It's like the twelfth word on page,
[00:40:44] McIntosh:
55 or or something. Okay. So when y'all break into my house, do not get the volume seven of the History of Middle Earth, ladies and gentlemen, because I would never hide my seed phrases in volume seven of the History of Middle Earth. Yeah. That happens to be the one I'm reading right now.
[00:41:08] Kenshin:
Nice. Yeah. I don't know how safe it is,
[00:41:12] McIntosh:
but it can be a fun way. I actually think that would be I mean, I don't know. I mean, you've got risk of fire. Right? Because your house burns down. You you your book's gone.
[00:41:26] Kenshin:
It doesn't matter. It it doesn't matter because you still have a seed phrase stamp on a metal plate that says 1255, which means the twelfth word of page 55. That's your first that's your first word of the seed phrase. I see. So the second one is thirty five sixty five or whatever. The thirty fifth word in page 65. You just need to know the actual book.
[00:41:53] McIntosh:
Right. You would have to potentially recover Yeah. The same book or get a new copy of the same book. Yeah. Okay. I see what you're saying. Okay. Yeah. No. That's that yeah. That's that's pretty solid.
[00:42:06] Kenshin:
You get the Don't do it in your first edition of I don't know. No. You get I don't know. Harry Potter. Yeah. Harry Potter book or something. Something that is popular that you can buy again and Mhmm. It's very inconspicuous. Right? It's just sitting there in the on your bookcase. I like I like that, that concept.
[00:42:27] McIntosh:
No. That's actually now I'm just thinking about that. That's pretty slick. And there's zero people who would figure that out. Like, that just
[00:42:37] Kenshin:
No. And if your seed phrase is compromised, they they don't know what to do with it.
[00:42:44] McIntosh:
Yeah. Because the book title is not on there. Yeah. I mean, you would literally have to piece that. Even if somebody looked at those washers and said, oh, I know what that is. If you didn't have the book title on the washers Yeah. Yeah. They're not I mean, okay. I'm a book person. Sorry. Yeah. They're not gonna find it in my collection. I promise you. Okay? The police will have shown up before they get done. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just my Tolkien books.
[00:43:16] Kenshin:
Yeah. I I I don't know what happens if you put that in a script and say, compare these to all the popular books and compare it with a list of those 2,048
[00:43:29] McIntosh:
words. I don't think the books are indexed like that. They're not Yeah. Not by page.
[00:43:35] Kenshin:
Not by page. You're right. I don't think so.
[00:43:39] McIntosh:
Yeah. Because books change size, formats. I mean, they're not all the same. Right. Right?
[00:43:47] Kenshin:
I
[00:43:48] McIntosh:
Mhmm. It's interesting. It's interesting. Yeah. It's interesting. That's pretty cool. And you could send your kids on a treasure hunt. Yeah. Exactly. Okay, kids. Go find dad's favorite book. Oh, god. It's the history of Middle Earth again. Just kidding. Which volume was it? Which volume was it? He's always talking about the trees in the vising guard. Again, that's the one I'm working on right now. I think that's volume seven. I'm not sure. Anyways, it is the treason of Isengard.
[00:44:19] Kenshin:
Okay.
[00:44:20] McIntosh:
What else? Yeah. I think we talked most about it. I mean, you gotta worry about fire. You gotta worry about flood. You gotta worry about your natural whatever your natural disasters are, whether that's tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, or earthquakes. Right? Unfortunately, you know, those are the things you gotta think about. You gotta think about keeping it safe from bad guys, whether that's people who break in your house or potentially I mean, I don't know. Whatever your family situation is, those those are things you gotta think about. Otherwise, you're at risk, and this stuff is too important.
If you're not willing to do that, then frankly, you should probably go buy buyBitstock or whatever it is that's the, I don't know. You know what I mean?
[00:45:12] Kenshin:
Yeah. And every six months or so, just try to verify that everything is where you placed it, and it hasn't faded
[00:45:20] McIntosh:
or damaged or something something. It is work, but it will give you peace of mind. Mhmm. Okay?
[00:45:32] Kenshin:
Yes.
[00:45:33] McIntosh:
Mistakes. I like this. Yeah. Let's talk about this.
[00:45:37] Kenshin:
Come on, mistakes. Yeah. I mean, of course, we said about never store anything digitally.
[00:45:44] McIntosh:
I was thinking about this very case, and I could not remember this Reddit user. They lost 7 Bitcoin. So almost a million dollars in today's money when their Google Photos backup was compromised in '20 they took a picture of their seed phrase with their Google phone or whatever Samsung. That backup was compromised, and they lost their Bitcoin. Because the reality is if somebody finds that, then they all they gotta do is plug those letters into a wallet. Yeah. I saw sorry. One more thing really quick. A video of an officer who'd pulled somebody over, and this was a long time ago. They they barely they, like, they did not know what Bitcoin was. They had no idea.
And they were looking through the guy's wallet, which I don't know why that was going on, but setting that aside. And they pulled out this thing, and it was on the officer's camera. That's what got out. And it was the seed phrases. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:47:00] Kenshin:
Yeah. I don't care your seat first with you. Oh, I don't have today with me. I have a watch. A Casio maybe I shouldn't say that. Don't say that. Don't No. No. I I I posted it on the street. It's okay. It's a Casio watch where you can store names. Okay. It has a keypad and you can store 25, contacts Right. Contacts. And it's offline. It has a battery that lasts ten years. So what do you do with a device like that? 25 words capacity there.
[00:47:38] McIntosh:
Very cool. I'm testing. Alright. Anyways, let's move on. We're getting we're getting along.
[00:47:48] Kenshin:
No. I mean, there are plenty of, house fires reported. I mean, human errors, you make a typo or something. The
[00:47:59] McIntosh:
California wildfires that happened a few months ago, there was a case where the paper backup was in a filing cabinet in the house. Probably relatively safe from burglary. Right? But not from wildfires, not from a house fire, which is what happened. Right? And, I mean, house fires happen. They they do. And it's something you need to think about. So they lost that. They donated it to the rest of us is what they did. But yeah.
[00:48:33] Kenshin:
And there has been also cases with, over engineering your backup. Yeah. Those we said those multisig or those Shamir secrets sharing, break it down to too many piece, too many locations, then maybe you don't figure it out correctly or your family members.
[00:48:51] McIntosh:
Or you think you're smart enough to devise your own backup system. And I don't wanna call people out. Right. But there is someone in the Bitcoin ecosystem, rather prominent person, who built their own backup system and lost 200 Bitcoin to it.
[00:49:12] Kenshin:
Oh. Mhmm. Yeah. I think there are plenty of disaster stories out there to learn from.
[00:49:21] McIntosh:
Don't make it too complex. Don't have a single point of failure as we would call it in the IT world. You do you need to remember redundancy, at least two copies. They do not need to be in the same location. I think that's well, I would think that's obvious, but don't keep them in the same house. Yeah. So what should people do? I don't know. Can you show us I'm just kidding. Alright. So sit down. Yeah. Figure out where you're at. Can you as you said here, can you find all your seat phrases backup? Seed phrase backups in under two minutes? I know I can, actually. Now there are some things that I promise you that I'm not the way they should be on this list, but I do know where my seed phrases are.
And it's not because they're sitting out in the open. Why that? Well, I don't know. A fire, or you had just had to leave in a hurry, an evacuation. Right? Alright. So what's the easiest way to get started? Pen and paper, essentially. Right? Yeah. And you've got that listed on here?
[00:50:40] Kenshin:
Yeah. Pen and paper. I would say again that type of paper that is at least waterproof and a permanent pen, that's good. If you have a little bit more budget and you don't need much, I've seen some, Bitcoin products that are over $50. You can just buy a metal piece of plate. You can it doesn't need to be titanium either. Stainless steel is more than good enough to survive a house fire as long as it's two millimeters Okay. Thick and more. So you can buy two two millimeter thick, stainless steel from somewhere that is not Bitcoin related and buy a stamping tool. So the plate can be, like, $510 max and, stamp tool the same, $10 or something. So for around 20, you can have a good very, very good backup that would last decades or more.
Yeah. That that's the minimum. You at least need to do a metal backup, I would say. And then,
[00:51:43] McIntosh:
we you need to make sure that you do a recovery
[00:51:48] Kenshin:
regardless of how you backup. Test yeah. You need to test your backup and keep testing it and keep showing it to at least one family member.
[00:51:58] McIntosh:
Just not the one that's mad at you. Yeah. Sorry.
[00:52:02] Kenshin:
Yeah.
[00:52:04] McIntosh:
Not when they see the price going up. Alright. I like what you have here about when you should upgrade. For paper backups, less than a thousand dollars. That sounds pretty good. Metal backups for a thousand to 50,000, and then multi sig for 50,000 plus. My only thing I would say about this is, and we've said this a couple times lately, right now, you may have, say, $10,000 of Bitcoin. Four years from now, that may be, that may be a 100,000. That's a 10 x. It can happen. And you always need to think ahead because we forget things. If I had personally, if I had kind of in the upper half of that metal backup, 25 to 50 k, I personally would be thinking about multi sig. That's just me.
Because Yeah. It's July 30. Kenshin is going to lose the bet that we do not have, and Bitcoin in the next two months is going to be hitting $1.50, or more. I guess that's my prediction, and he's shaking his head, ladies and gentlemen. You should see it. You're going down now. I'm sorry. It won't go. Just the price literally won't go down, Kenshin. Have you been watching?
[00:53:32] Kenshin:
I know. It's gonna go sideways until September.
[00:53:37] McIntosh:
Hey. That's the fun of it. We'll see. But Yeah. I mean, seriously, by the end of the year, I think we're well beyond where we're at right now. And I don't, you know, this stuff takes a while. So be thinking about that. Alright?
[00:53:54] Kenshin:
Yep. Yeah. And we can just close with this, closing thought that's yeah. Bit in Bitcoin, you're your own bank. So you really need to make, to take into consideration the the backups and and how you store everything and how you operate that said bank. Right? So it's your responsibility. It's it's and it's not not only for you, I would say. It's, for your family as well. And future generations as we like to say here. Yeah. And,
[00:54:27] McIntosh:
Yeah. And that's heavy, but it brings a lot of freedom with it. Alright. Very cool. Do we have a question? That is not a question. That's an old question.
[00:54:44] Kenshin:
No. I mean, how how do people deal with, the backup? And they don't have to say what they do for backup, but do do they follow some of those steps? I I know I usually do it in the summers. Do you have some sort of timeline you do that? Or do you worry about it? Do you procrastinate? Do you postpone?
[00:55:07] McIntosh:
My problem is I just get so busy that it just whatever it was is what it was, and it I don't think about it. And then I wake up and go, oh, wait. Maybe I need to maybe I need to update that. I I am fortunate in that I'm using my my wallet, seed signer, enough that I'm not gonna forget how to use it. Okay? But, yeah, there are things that I definitely should be doing at this point that I am not. So I appreciate, this just for that. You could have saved my family a literal fortune. Thank you, Kenshin. Right. Not that I have that fortune now just in case anybody's listening. Yeah. Yeah.
I wished. Alright. I wished, but if I did, you wouldn't know. So what does it matter? I'm telling you, man. How will you know when Macintosh makes it? I might actually drive him a newer truck.
[00:56:17] Kenshin:
You will stop doing podcast.
[00:56:19] McIntosh:
I don't know. You know, I sometimes it feels like abuse, but after four years, I think I would have stopped by now if I was gonna stop.
[00:56:30] Kenshin:
Right.
[00:56:32] McIntosh:
To have it. It's amazing how many people have come and gone in the last four years. It's hard. Podcasting's hard. It is.
[00:56:41] Kenshin:
People think that this is Consistency is hard. Yeah. Fun and games and I mean,
[00:56:47] McIntosh:
I don't know. Alright. Hey. Are we supposed to talk about the price of Bitcoin? Do we have it? Do we know it? What is it? I have it. I I did update it. You're
[00:57:00] Kenshin:
yeah. So how much is in dollars?
[00:57:04] McIntosh:
A 117,800.
[00:57:06] Kenshin:
Yeah. And euros is around 102,500. So we're we're above 100 for the last few weeks. It's great. It's bad for my DCA, but it's great.
[00:57:17] McIntosh:
Yeah. That kinda stinks. I go and strike and look. It's like, man, it's less sats this week than last week.
[00:57:24] Kenshin:
Yeah. I don't look at the Bitcoin price anymore. I just see the strike notification every morning. It's like, oh, this is how much you stack today. That's right. You do it daily, don't you? Yeah. Very small amount, but still keeps me it's interesting.
[00:57:40] McIntosh:
Alright. And then the price last July 30 was actually 66,201. So we are up a insignificant 77.9%. Wow. Mhmm.
[00:57:53] Kenshin:
And Bitcoin market cap then is at $2,300,000,000,000. And gold's market cap is 23 point 200,000,000,000.0 Mhmm. Which brings the Bitcoin versus gold market cap at 10.1.
[00:58:07] McIntosh:
Yeah, baby.
[00:58:08] Kenshin:
Steady over 10. Mhmm.
[00:58:10] McIntosh:
Right now we're looking at two sets per v byte in the mempool, and I will say things are picking up. Got a couple 100 megabytes of unprocessed transactions and about 30,000, actual transactions. So that's good. That's good. Hey. Real quick. I saw that you should follow me on Nostr if you're not already. But I I posted I think it was earlier today. I don't know. My days have run together, but I reposted somebody posted a video of Dave Ramsey, who's a very famous financial person here in The United States. And I actually thought I came up with a very good post. I'm not gonna repeat it. You're gonna have to go follow me. I will say that Dave has finally said Bitcoin is, you know, he's not saying it's rat poison or something like that.
But he's still being Dave, and he just can't pass it up. He had to talk about the vol as he says, the volatility. It's like, dude, zoom out. Alright. Enough. Yeah. Follow me on Nostr. You can find out what I said there.
[00:59:23] Kenshin:
Okay. I will go check it out. I haven't seen it. You should follow me on Nostr. I am. I am. But, not it's weird. In the summer, I don't have time for social media. I don't go there so far. That's good. I'm glad to hear it.
[00:59:39] McIntosh:
I am struggling with that myself. Not that I don't have enough time. I don't, but I spend too much time on it. And one of my kids is frankly calling me out on it. Shout outs to them. And I haven't been on Twitter a whole lot. Now I you kinda say Twitter is something that we do for the podcast, but but, you know, I spent too much time on Twitter Mhmm. Frankly. So
[01:00:03] Kenshin:
No.
[01:00:04] McIntosh:
And I've gotten back. I stayed off Facebook forever, and I've kinda gotten back into it even though I I still don't post. I hate posting on Facebook. Oh, no. Alright. Hey. We've gone long enough. Let's wrap this up. Satoshi's Plebs is a value for value podcast supporting podcasting two point o. No ads, no sponsorships, just honest Bitcoin content. I deliberately avoid sponsors because even if I love a company, Seed Cider, taking their money would influence my opinion. What if something goes wrong with that company? I would hesitate to warn you. By the way, Seed Cider is gonna be on in a couple weeks. Oh. So they got a new version, and I'm a I am pumped. I I think I've already said this. I'm getting one by the end of the year. So instead, I ask, are you getting value from this show? Support it through time, talent, or treasure. You can help with, actually, chapters with transcripts, and now you will be able to help with our website. That would be great, maybe, because we'll have it on a GitHub repo.
You can stream sets. You can boost with messages, even just a 100 sets saying great show or you suck. We'll read it. Check out the apps at podcastapps.com and support Bitcoin independent media. If you like the content, I would love it if you would tell your friends about the podcast. That is the best way for us to grow. This week's music is new. Kenshin won't like it, but that's okay. It's, Electro
[01:01:39] Kenshin:
elect oh, good god. Do you want me to read it? You send it to me. Electromador,
[01:01:45] McIntosh:
with a song called Cypherpunk's Not Dead. It's kind of a little bit of electronic, I'm not sure trance is the right word, but, you know, just something different. If you don't like it, stop. That's fine. But any boosting or streaming a sat during that song will go straight to the artist.
[01:02:03] Kenshin:
Yeah. And I called it a lecture boudoir, and you laughed at it. I don't know why.
[01:02:08] McIntosh:
Well, it's a funky word. Troubadour is a word for a musician, and I'm sure that's what he's playing on. Okay. But I it just doesn't quite flow, to be honest. You might wanna think about that guy. But it's I like the song. I'm just saying. Sorry. I that's probably a little too much. Okay.
[01:02:28] Kenshin:
Yes. So thanks for being here. We hope this has been helpful, and we would love to hear from you. Find all our contact info at satoshis.plebs.com/episode-220. Stay humble. DCA sats and have a great weekend.
[01:02:43] McIntosh:
We'll talk to you all soon. Bye bye. Safe and longs not undead. Safer belongs now dead.
[01:05:38] Kenshin:
.
[01:06:50] McIntosh:
. .
Welcome back to Satoshi's Plebs for episode two twenty. I'm Macintosh.
[00:00:06] Kenshin:
And I am Ken Shin. Yeah. And today we're sorry. Yes. And today we're tackling one of the most critical aspects of Bitcoin's of custody
[00:00:16] McIntosh:
that often gets overlooked until it's too late, seed phrase backups. Whether you're new to Bitcoin or you've been stacking for years, properly backing up your seed phrase is literally the difference between financial sovereignty and losing everything forever.
[00:00:31] Kenshin:
And with summer here and a bit more time on our hands, there's no better opportunity to audit our backups. Maybe you've been putting off that metal backup upgrade or you know you need to distribute your copies better.
[00:00:46] McIntosh:
Alright. I am so happy to have you back. Yeah. Happy to be back. As I've said every time everyone's like I miss you. Oh, man. I did not realize, the dynamic, I guess, until you were until you've been off for a few weeks. So Yeah. Very, very glad to have you back. But, what's been going on with you? I think you've you've been busy. Yeah. I'm in the summer vacations. So that's been,
[00:01:14] Kenshin:
good. It's been very sunny. Unusual for Sweden and for July. So that's been very good. I have been much outside, to be honest. I've been clothing a lot, fighting. Clothing. Yeah. Fighting, actually, with Claude a lot and getting frustrated until 3AM most days. But we are getting close to my project with my wife to be hopefully live maybe this week, I hope, end of this week. So that that's exciting.
[00:01:50] McIntosh:
So what I'm hearing is that the honeymoon with Claude is over. Oh, yeah.
[00:01:56] Kenshin:
Yes. And I'm afraid it's not only my fault. I think he's getting worse and worse. We talked a bit about it behind the scenes. I I think it's overloaded and they tweak the settings down so he's not so smart as he used to be, literally.
[00:02:13] McIntosh:
I need the smart version, man.
[00:02:16] Kenshin:
Yeah. I started using Opus, which is very expensive, but it feels a bit more smart, actually. It makes a difference.
[00:02:25] McIntosh:
That's the whole idea, I think. It's a bigger, dataset, whatever. Yeah. Yep. And you? Alright. So I've been doing cloud a bit on my own as well, aside from trying to hold the showdown, maybe unsuccessfully, since we didn't have any supporters this week.
[00:02:45] Kenshin:
But I I was jealous of of the last episode. That was really good with Andreas. Yeah. We had a great interview,
[00:02:52] McIntosh:
with the guy from from bit bit safe bitcoin. Bitcoin. Bitcoin safe. Safe.org. He's a great guy. Glad I got to talk to him. I I meant what I said last week. I'm going to I think I'm for maybe a winter project, I'm gonna go ahead and implement that and look at using it as the backup for kind of the family. You know, I I do I kinda do the uncle Jim thing for some very close family members. So I think this might provide a good model for that. I'm
[00:03:31] Kenshin:
Alright. When I when I heard the Nostr integration, I got really excited, and I think I I will try it very soon, actually. I like the you can back up your labels and stuff.
[00:03:42] McIntosh:
This is
[00:03:43] Kenshin:
really good solutions.
[00:03:45] McIntosh:
So I have been working on a new website for us. I did wanna report about this. So this is where I've been using Claude. And for the most part successfully. Although I am experiencing some of the same things that you are, but I'm really excited about our new website. I'm almost done. I was hoping to have it done today, but, the meat grinder of work got in the way again. And, but I basically, I'm bringing in there's over 200 pages of WordPress, and I'm bringing into Hugo, which is a static website. But it it will be much faster than the old WordPress site, which is good. Yeah. But it also supports markdown, and it basically, we will be able to push codes, well, markdown straight up to GitHub, and it will automatically, get populated and work. It will be Right. I I think it will really improve our workflow.
So I'm really looking forward to that. Yeah. I fully support the this decision with Hugo. I I used a few years. It's it's really nice. Very, very fast. Very simple. So we'll basically just take the notes that we've got and push them up and and walk away. You know? It'll it'll be nice. So Yeah. Because that is one of the things that I have to do. And frankly, I'm gonna stop doing it because I do believe this would be the last week we would even post there. But as part of my episode release process, I push up to Fountain, and then I turn around and I go and make a web page. You know, I clone it and then I update it. And it's not a big deal, but it's just another thing you've got to do.
And so, anyways, Yeah. Hopefully, we'll have good news on that. So as I mentioned, honestly, we didn't have any support this week. No idea why. I don't know. Just one of these things. Summer. Yep. Yeah. I think in general, across the board, the podcast support is down. I mean, I I don't know if it's the economy. It does tend to be somewhat seasonal seasonal, I have noticed. And by the way, we're it's been almost speaking of almost four years.
[00:06:06] Kenshin:
It's crazy. Congratulations. Yeah.
[00:06:09] McIntosh:
I thought that was pretty cool. It was like August 21, I think, was episode one of 2021. So it's been a bit, we have and maybe we'll I we'll save that for that episode or the one nearest to it. It's been a bit, and we've changed a lot. But, yeah, it's good stuff. Nice. I've learned a few
[00:06:31] Kenshin:
things. Yeah.
[00:06:34] McIntosh:
Lessons learned portal on that website in a month. Yeah. We can do that. I was thinking more along the lines of I learned a few things like how to program Hugo, but okay. Sure. We'll do that. And and ignore other coins. Well, that yeah. No. I know that's what you're talking about. Stop bringing up my past, can't you? Come on. It's Bitcoin only podcast. Oh, and I did wanna say one other thing. In the last few weeks, since you've been gone, I've I've had the meetup, my local meetup, and, frankly, we had a good time. It was interesting because, believe it or not, I walked in and we meet at a restaurant.
And I sit down and I look across the table, and, there was a person there that I had not seen in a long time. I don't know exactly, because I've seen them around town once or twice, but, frankly, it's been thirty years since we had regular contact with them. And they showed up at the meetup. And they seem to be genuinely interested. They may be listening to the podcast. To say that they were a little confused when they heard my name is probably an understatement. I had to explain to them later because, of course, I use a a non diploma. What do they call it? It's something else.
NIM. Suda NIM? Yeah. Because I just I don't know. Just we've talked about that before. But yeah. She's they're like, what? Wait. But they were good sport, and we had a good conversation afterwards. I I talked to him for a couple of minutes, and, yeah, yeah, it was a good meeting. But that was just kinda funny. And I think over time, this is what's gonna happen. People are going to come on board because they're ready. This is just a natural process. You know? Right.
[00:08:37] Kenshin:
Yeah. That's what I realized too. They they're coming when they're ready. I had family friends come on their own eventually.
[00:08:44] McIntosh:
So that's Yeah. I was I was very happy to see them. I think they will, they'll do very well. Alright. What are we talking about this week?
[00:08:55] Kenshin:
You know how it is. It's summer. You're thinking. You have more time on your hands. What to do? No, you don't. I'm sorry.
[00:09:04] McIntosh:
Most people do have more time on their hands. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:09:09] Kenshin:
I see Mike in touch. No, he said like, no, I don't. Yeah. But, for me, it's been like that. Like, oh, yeah. I I have time now. I need to fix my backups. I need to stamp a seed, you know, a metal plate or something, or where do I hide them? So I thought it's interesting to to see and talk about the different ways to back up a good phrase and, how to manage that situation. And, yeah, maybe we
[00:09:38] McIntosh:
we help each other a bit. Let's do it.
[00:09:43] Kenshin:
Yes. So if we start, first of all, for anyone who doesn't know, I don't think there is anyone now out there, at least in our podcast. Right? But what is a seed phrase? Well, a seed phrase is 12 or 16 or 24 or now different, wallets give you different amount of words, but usually it's 12 or 24 words that, basically, that's your backup to your wallet. And if your wallet, yeah, is deleted or or whatever, then you can restore that wallet again with those 12 or 24 words.
[00:10:24] McIntosh:
These could be viewed as the keys, essentially, to your to your wallet. Yeah. That that's
[00:10:31] Kenshin:
yeah. Most importantly, that's actually the key to your wallet. Mhmm. And and the actual wallet doesn't do anything. Right. It only shows you what those keys which addresses are represented by those keys. Okay. If you don't have those keys, the wallet is useless. And those keys are are what you sign the transactions with. And you you prove that that Bitcoin that is publicly visible Mhmm. That it belongs to you. You have the sign in keys. So the the seed phrase is the most important part in your setup, I would say. Okay. So that's why that is, so important or that's why it matters so much how to back it up and how to to manage it, essentially. Right? Okay.
And, there is the so called beep 39. So if anyone is curious to know where those words come from, there is the beep, b I p 39, list of words. Is 2,048 words. And it's a specially curated list of words, actually, because no two words in that list start with the same four characters. Okay. Alright.
[00:11:57] McIntosh:
So So that makes it difficult to, like, mix them up.
[00:12:02] Kenshin:
Yeah. Mhmm. Exactly. And you can always use the first four letters of each words
[00:12:08] McIntosh:
to restore a wallet. You don't even have to use the whole word, actually. So you okay. I Yeah. Learned something new right there. I did not know that. Yeah. But that makes sense. If they are unique, then yeah. Yeah. So a lot of thought went into those words.
[00:12:25] Kenshin:
Yes. A lot. And, many backup, tools that we will talk about, they they tell you you can only, backup the first four letters and it's enough. So you don't even have to write down the full words if you don't want to.
[00:12:44] McIntosh:
I am trying to find the actual BIP 39 and I cannot. It just brings up too many links.
[00:12:51] Kenshin:
I can send to you. It's on GitHub. Yeah. And the most interesting part is, there are lists for multiple languages. So I just sent it to you. Okay. And then there is an English list, of course. There's Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, French, Italian, Czech, and Portuguese. Cool.
[00:13:16] McIntosh:
And you can actually mix those up as we were talking about before.
[00:13:21] Kenshin:
Right? Yes. That's I I never tried it. I want to actually try it. I because you have those 2,048 words in each list. So every word, let's say, the tenth word in English is, let's say, car. I don't know which one it is, but let's say it's car. So that tenth word represents the tenth word in the dictionary. Mhmm. So if you go to another language and you take that tenth word, it should, it represents the same, how is it called? Cold, let's say, the same beat beat in the sequence.
[00:13:58] McIntosh:
Right. So you you use it based on what number word it is. Yeah. I looked here. So actually, the very first word in English is abandoned. Okay? Right. If you go to French, it's not the first word. It's abecer. I hope I said that right. The second word is actually whatever French how you say abandon.
[00:14:27] Kenshin:
Yeah. But if you change the first English word in your seed phrase for the first French words. Yeah. Oh, because it's alphabetical.
[00:14:36] McIntosh:
A I a b a I s s e r comes before a b a n d o n. See what I'm saying? That fourth character
[00:14:46] Kenshin:
interest alphabetical. Within their list, they're alphabetical. But but you should you can substitute the the first word of one list to the first word of the other and it should restore.
[00:14:56] McIntosh:
Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. That's interesting. So next time, instead of abandon, I'll put abbeser and it'll confuse everybody and it'll be great. Yeah. Exactly.
[00:15:07] Kenshin:
Yeah. So I I would like to make one, that has a mix of those. Mhmm. So it it's not obvious at the beginning. It's like, what is that mix of different words in different languages? So maybe that's a good I suggest that when you do that, you start with all of your Bitcoin savings. Yes. Do that. Maybe not. But don't come to us. Okay.
[00:15:29] McIntosh:
So let's talk about some of the misconceptions about these seed phrases. And you already mentioned this that, for example, the hardware wallet, we because we call it a wallet and then we associate that well, I have a wallet. I carry money around. Well, surely the hardware wallet, in this case, it holds your Bitcoin. No. It doesn't. No. The hardware wallet is just holding the keys that are used to access that Bitcoin. The Bitcoin is out there. It's it's addresses on the blockchain. That's it.
[00:16:04] Kenshin:
Right? Yeah. Exactly. And that's why the software is very important because it it holds the key. And whoever has the key can send and receive your Bitcoin. Yeah.
[00:16:17] McIntosh:
Okay.
[00:16:18] Kenshin:
And, yeah. But rule number one of backup, never ever store the seed phrase
[00:16:27] McIntosh:
digitally. Wait. Kenshin? You mean, I can't put it on this picture here and send it? I just ran a picture, but, you know, and send it. No? Not a good idea.
[00:16:40] Kenshin:
Please don't. No. As we know, every software gets hacked eventually, one way or another. So you don't want your seed phrase to be
[00:16:48] McIntosh:
Right. Visible to someone. And that's iCloud. I mean, a lot of people don't think about this. You you don't need to have it on your phone in any form Mhmm. Really, in my opinion. Whether that's your little notebook or taking a picture of a piece of paper with your phone that has your seed phrases on it. I have heard of people getting hacked that way. It does happen. Yeah. It's certainly accessible. Well, they say it's not, but I would say it's accessible by Apple, if not hackers who get into Apple's setup. So
[00:17:28] Kenshin:
Yeah. Could be a bad actor within Apple. Who knows? Or wherever. I mean, people suggest also no password managers. That's also good because we think as passwords managers, it's very secure, but still, that's also software. And the password manager might be secure, but the browser that you load it through might not or you never know. Some sort of, key logger or anything really. I mean, I heard actually, recently, I heard the printer driver that was malicious. Reported that. And it was I remember that. Yeah. So, I mean, there are crazy scenarios out there that, can be become reality and steal your Bitcoin in that way. So better not to use anything digital.
And when you write down your seed phrase, not to have any cameras nearby that's I don't know. Maybe,
[00:18:29] McIntosh:
you know, what happens sometimes. You can't be too you cannot be too careful. And you just kinda need to think that through. I know we live our lives digitally, and this is digital money, obviously, but this is one case where you don't wanna be digital, most likely. Right?
[00:18:48] Kenshin:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what do we do then? Mhmm. Yeah.
[00:18:53] McIntosh:
What are so like, what's the cheapest what's the easiest, cheapest way to do this?
[00:18:58] Kenshin:
Yeah. I mean, the easiest way is a piece of paper and a pen, I would say. Okay. That's the easiest. So and it's accessible, and it can be temporary until you get a better backup solution. And, of course, we say always never put a lot of money initially when you make a new wallet. So that's the easiest. Just take a piece of paper, a pen, not a pencil. Right? And just write those 12 words or 24 words down. Because the pencil will fade? Yes. The pencil will fade. Makes sense. What I did for my first time, actually, or my first good setup, of course, the first time, I I think I put it on the computer. Right? As we all did.
But the first time I bought a new wallet, a new hardware wallet Mhmm. Cold storage, my first backup of that wallet was on, I bought a special notepad that was waterproof. So it was paper, but water resistant. Right. And I tested it. So indeed it didn't dissolve it with water. And I took a pen, how are they called this? A permanent pen. Right. And I did a test. I wrote on it. I watered it a lot and, yeah. It survived the test. Of course, it doesn't survive fire. Right. Which then is the next step. So the first step is paper any way or form, but then you need to the more money you put into that wallet, the more you have to lose.
Then you need to advance the the backup to something like a metal Mhmm. Piece of, yeah, a metal plate and stamp on it, the seed phrase.
[00:20:47] McIntosh:
Can I add one little caveat to that? I would argue that as long as it makes economic sense at all almost that you really probably need to move faster even if you only have a couple $100 of Bitcoin because you may only have a couple $100 of Bitcoin now. But if you think in the long term, as we've talked about all the time on this show, you don't know what that's gonna be worth in ten years. And if I say, well, it's only a couple $100, I'm just gonna keep it on paper. And, you know, I only have one copy and it's not in my safe and wow.
You may be throwing away a lot of money in the long term. You know? You're not gonna retire on a couple $100 most likely, but, but it could be significant. I mean, it could be Yeah. In in a long enough time frame. Right? So something to think about.
[00:21:51] Kenshin:
Yep. Yeah. And it's good when you have the time to go through the full way and get the metal plate and do the whole stamping thing. Other people do steel washers. You know, those washers you put between a screw and, whatever you're screwing on, and they stamp there on on this type of those rings, and then they put a bolt and a nut or somehow a lock in the whole thing. So
[00:22:20] McIntosh:
So so I've seen examples of this online. This is not something I've ever done, but you you you buy the parts, which they really would be cheap. But then you're stamping on that, washer. Right? So you have to buy the this and is the stamp letters or is it, like, some other way of signify?
[00:22:44] Kenshin:
No. No. It is the same stamps that you would use on a metal plate. You you but you need a little tool and you can three d print that. Really? To Okay. Yeah. To position the the washer and position the the stamp the stamps. And then you move it around so it really helps. That's interesting. Yeah. There are a few models online for free that you can download and print three d print or you can buy a kit ready made that are also cheap. But then, yeah, whoever you buy from and that's another thing wherever you buy from I I I don't want to buy a Bitcoin backup steel kit.
I prefer to buy on my own a metal plate from this place, a stamping tool from that place, you know, nothing associated with Bitcoin. I buy, like, a random plate metal plate from AliExpress, for example. And the stamping kit that is made to stamp, you know, whatever the those artistic uses. Right? It's not nothing that says Bitcoin. So the seller doesn't know that I am backing up a Bitcoin seed phrase. That's good. And that's also interesting. For example, on Amazon, of course, I have bought Bitcoin books. So Amazon knows I'm into Bitcoin. But yeah. So at some point, of course, you need to leak that information somewhere, but it's it's good to be mindful. Okay.
Do you have any other ways to back up? I mean, there are some products.
[00:24:29] McIntosh:
I don't want to mention any specific ones, but There are commercial products, and, for good reasons, I don't think we need to really get into those. No. I think just doing it on paper of some kind or a sheet of metal or the steel washers, that's kind of that's the three basic ways of doing it. It kind of covers everything, to be honest, for physical backups like that.
[00:24:55] Kenshin:
I have one more way. Some hardware wallets, they they generate their own backup that you can store on an SD card, for example. It is digital, but it's cold. Sure. Because, the wallet's cold storage. The SD cards, yeah. You take it. Right. Yeah. It never touches something online, let's say.
[00:25:24] McIntosh:
That makes sense. My concern with that would be ten years from now, is that SD card still good? Not that you you can I'm sure you'll be able to load it in terms of you can even if we moved on to another format, there'll still be adapters or whatever. But the Mhmm. Card itself, I've had CDs that have gone bad over time. I've had hard drives that have gone bad over time, floppy disk. All of this media eventually breaks down for whatever reason that it is. It doesn't matter why it does happen, and it doesn't take very many bits flipping, so to speak, in your little SD card to render that useless. Yeah. I agree. So yes. Be careful about that if you're if that's going to be your process.
[00:26:20] Kenshin:
Yeah. And and if you have it part of the processes yeah. It shouldn't be the only part of the process. And I would say if you do do that, there are the so called, SD cards that are industrial grade. So if you search for industrial SD card, then those are supposed to last more years Right. Higher temperatures and water and yeah. So I I got a couple of those, for example, for that reason.
[00:26:51] McIntosh:
Yeah. I I do wanna say this, and you have this here. Regardless of what process you choose to utilize, when you get done making your backup, you need to test it.
[00:27:08] Kenshin:
Yeah. Right?
[00:27:11] McIntosh:
You like, you give an example here. Oh, you're making a new wallet or whatever. You wanna put $5 worth of Bitcoin in it and then back that up and restore that before you put $5.00 $0.00 worth of Bitcoin. I think that was 50,000.
[00:27:29] Kenshin:
It's a million zeros. Right.
[00:27:32] McIntosh:
Well, our money's almost worthless, so there's gotta be a lot of zeros.
[00:27:37] Kenshin:
Yes.
[00:27:38] McIntosh:
Right? Because that's something that you don't wanna mess up.
[00:27:45] Kenshin:
Right. Yeah. That's very important.
[00:27:48] McIntosh:
Yes. And then what do you do after you have backed up your seed phrase? Where do you Well, any good DBA would tell you that you need to store it somewhere, and you need to think about that.
[00:27:59] Kenshin:
Right. And usually, you need more than one backup. Right?
[00:28:04] McIntosh:
That is a good standard practice. Yes. It's called redundancy, and, it's multiple copies.
[00:28:12] Kenshin:
Yeah. And that's the stage I am now actually personally and that's my personal summer project with my wife is to figure out where to put the backups. Because right now, we're doing the exact opposite of what you should never do, is store your backups in the same spot.
[00:28:31] McIntosh:
That sounds like a really needed summer project for you.
[00:28:35] Kenshin:
Yep.
[00:28:37] McIntosh:
Alright. So we don't keep them all in one location, and that's going to vary depending on the person. Maybe, for example, you keep one at your parents' house and you keep one at your house, or a safe in another location, or a bank deposit box in another location. I have said in the past on here, one with your lawyer. I'm not sure that that's a really good idea, but I guess it's a possibility. Maybe depending on the backup. And we're gonna talk about some multisig backups here in just a second. If it's a multisig backup, they cannot recover your funds with just a single key. So that's that's safer.
[00:29:27] Kenshin:
Yeah. Then that's a tricky part. And, yeah, we can talk about it soon. Yeah. Maybe you got multiple houses. I don't know.
[00:29:34] McIntosh:
Maybe you got a summer house, you know, whatever. I mean, what whatever works for you. Everybody's got different situations, but you do want multiple backups because things happen.
[00:29:45] Kenshin:
Yeah.
[00:29:46] McIntosh:
And things that we don't even like to think about, fire, flood. You know, there was just an earthquake, by the way, off the coast of Russia, and it was apparently a pretty bad one. And there are lots of chaos and lots of, you know, stuff. The area where I live in, no no earthquakes, knock on wood. But maybe we have hurricanes, for example. Right? Right. And so you got to think through these things. How are you gonna deal with that?
[00:30:23] Kenshin:
Yeah. And then there is, of course, how secure it is a place versus how accessible is a place where you store it. Some people I heard that might put it in a even in a safe deposit box in a bank. Mhmm. But can you access that if need be, on a weekend? No? No. You cannot.
[00:30:45] McIntosh:
And I that's probably not a problem, to be honest, if it's actual true cold storage for your Bitcoin. You shouldn't have to access it on a weekend. Right. Yeah. But Yeah. You should But it is something. I mean, it's valid either way, really. Right? But you're paying for that as well. I mean, I don't know what those things are. And maybe with the amount of Bitcoin we're talking about, it doesn't matter. But, you know, there's a cost there.
[00:31:19] Kenshin:
Yeah. And a trust.
[00:31:22] McIntosh:
Well, let's I so I'm glad you ended it that way because so the next way of doing this well, this isn't really about multi sig. That's later. Sorry. Never mind. Well, no. This is like a multi. Talk about this. What what do you mean by this? This two or three approach?
[00:31:41] Kenshin:
The it is a yeah. It is a multi sig type of thing. Oh oh, no. Or it's it's also a Shamir's secret sharing, I would say. So you can split your seed phrase to three pieces, for example, with this technique called Shamir secret sharing. And, you need, let's say, two of the three pieces. Or you can split it in five and you need three of those pieces. And you can choose in the software when you do that. You can choose how many pieces you split it and how many pieces you need to recover it.
[00:32:16] McIntosh:
Right. And the important part, so the thing that protects you, say, in the case of the bank, safety deposit. They even if you just have two or three, they're only gonna have one copy. One part, I should say. And therefore, they cannot recover that password, those seed phrases.
[00:32:37] Kenshin:
Yeah. Exactly. And and if I would give one to a family member in another country, I don't know. They might lose it or it might fall in the wrong hands somehow. So you don't want that piece to be the full key that they can restore the whole wallet. So it's it's best in some way when you distribute your key geographically in places that you don't have control, it's best that it's not a full key. So you can do that as a multisig, so it's multiple separate keys that are needed to unlock the wallet or if it's a key split in multiple ports, but is essentially the same result.
This is a bit more advanced but I would say it feels more and more necessary to do especially if you have an amount that you feel it's significant now or in future terms? Yeah. I think
[00:33:37] McIntosh:
so one of the recent news items is, for example, they're making changes so that four zero one k's can hold Bitcoin. It's the way I understand it. And that is literally a multitrillion dollar market here in The United States. I'm not saying everyone with a four zero one k is gonna convert over to Bitcoin. However, this does mean, for example, that there's a lot more capital that is available, and people are going to start having there are some people, not maybe not the average person, but there are some people who are gonna have significant amounts of capital money in Bitcoin.
And so you don't you do need to think about these things. Right? You need to think about how can I split all this up and make sure that things are safe and whatever? Or the alternative is you turn it over to somebody like Fidelity and let them deal with it, and then you depend on them. And I will direct you to any number of hacks that resulted in the loss of Bitcoin. And then there's a recovery process, and it can take years. I think at this point, Mt. Gox is finally resolved, but it's been a decade. And I'm at the point in my life when a decade's a long time and not really what I wanna go through. You know what I mean?
Right. Yep. So hope that helped. Alright. Yep. What else?
[00:35:23] Kenshin:
Another part since we're talking about distributing and some of those advanced techniques, I would say, how do you deal with inheritance planning? Right? Because the more advanced you do it, if you do a multisig or Shamir's, secret sharing. I mean Right. How do your better half or some other part of your family recover this? And so I don't know. There are many ways to do it, of course. But the way you yeah. You need to plan for it in one way or another. And for me personally, the only planning I have done so far is just to teach my wife to do Right. To do it. To reco to recover the seed phrase.
[00:36:05] McIntosh:
You're ahead of a lot of people if you've done that. I think there's a lot of people probably, frankly, who haven't even left written instructions, and they have to if they're gone, then their family has to figure it out. And what if they don't know the password? What if they don't know what computer it's on? What if they're not computer savvy? My suggestion would be you better have some good instructions. Where do you leave those instructions? Are they in a safe? You know, I mean, you have to think about multiple layers. Now you could leave it with your lawyer saying, you know, don't open unless there's a valid death certificate presented to you.
Again, you're trusting that lawyer, but it is certainly something that you could do. And if they don't if it's sealed and they don't know what's inside of it, then, you know, the the the family would be present. So you would presume at that point that everything would be okay, but you are placing some level of trust in that lawyer. For one thing, they're gonna stick it on a shelf in their law office. What happens if they have a fire? These are all crazy, morbid, wild things, but but life happens. I mean, this is just the stuff that does actually happen over a long enough time frame.
[00:37:32] Kenshin:
Yeah. And that opens a much bigger discussion that I don't think we have time, but this inheritance planning and how you do it properly,
[00:37:41] McIntosh:
I think we can dedicate an episode to that because that interests me too in personal level how to do it. And I don't wanna promote other businesses. I don't have any Bitcoin on them. I don't know. I don't know. But there are businesses out there that help you prepare for inheritance of Bitcoin. That's essentially one of their products. Do your own research, blah blah blah. Not really what I would recommend, but it is a possibility. Yeah. Fair enough? Yeah.
[00:38:17] Kenshin:
Yeah. Let's see. Before we jump to the more fun stuff, there is another one I would like to talk about. How how do you deal with physical risk of of, yeah, someone trying to rob your house or something? And there is a couple of good ways. Of course, you you hide
[00:38:40] McIntosh:
your wallets. We call those guns, Kenshin. I know that, in Europe, y'all are not not familiar with those. I'm just kidding. I had to throw it in there. It was the obvious redneck thing to say. Yeah.
[00:38:53] Kenshin:
But that was a good one. It's a decoy wallet.
[00:38:57] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:38:58] Kenshin:
So you can have a Yeah. I like this. Yeah. So a seed phrase that is has a little bit of Bitcoin in there, just enough to make it reasonable. Plausible. I don't know. A thousand dollars maybe, or 500 or whatever. And that's it. And, just say, yeah. That's all I have. Here's, backup and here's everything. And I know there are hardware wallets and even software wallets that supports this function. So if you put a secondary code on the hardware wallet Yes. It opens up the decoy wallet. So you can prove that, yes, indeed, here is the seed phrase, and that's the the hardware wallet or the software wallet, and here are the funds, and everything works like normal. And then it auto distracts after, yeah, they have some mechanism.
Mhmm. So those are really good backup of the backup, let's say, solution. Okay. But that also needs time. That's also a summer project, I would say, to really sort this whole flow down and put it down and make it look credible.
[00:40:05] McIntosh:
Mhmm.
[00:40:08] Kenshin:
Yes. Any questions so far?
[00:40:10] McIntosh:
I'm hanging in there. Okay. I'm a little low energy today. I'm sorry. I've not gotten sleep for two nights in a row, at least not very much. So but, no, this is great. This is great. What else we got?
[00:40:26] Kenshin:
There is a fun way to back up a a seed phrase that I I would also like to try. You take a book.
[00:40:35] McIntosh:
I saw this.
[00:40:36] Kenshin:
Yeah. And you you find the words in the book, and then you find the system. It's like the twelfth word on page,
[00:40:44] McIntosh:
55 or or something. Okay. So when y'all break into my house, do not get the volume seven of the History of Middle Earth, ladies and gentlemen, because I would never hide my seed phrases in volume seven of the History of Middle Earth. Yeah. That happens to be the one I'm reading right now.
[00:41:08] Kenshin:
Nice. Yeah. I don't know how safe it is,
[00:41:12] McIntosh:
but it can be a fun way. I actually think that would be I mean, I don't know. I mean, you've got risk of fire. Right? Because your house burns down. You you your book's gone.
[00:41:26] Kenshin:
It doesn't matter. It it doesn't matter because you still have a seed phrase stamp on a metal plate that says 1255, which means the twelfth word of page 55. That's your first that's your first word of the seed phrase. I see. So the second one is thirty five sixty five or whatever. The thirty fifth word in page 65. You just need to know the actual book.
[00:41:53] McIntosh:
Right. You would have to potentially recover Yeah. The same book or get a new copy of the same book. Yeah. Okay. I see what you're saying. Okay. Yeah. No. That's that yeah. That's that's pretty solid.
[00:42:06] Kenshin:
You get the Don't do it in your first edition of I don't know. No. You get I don't know. Harry Potter. Yeah. Harry Potter book or something. Something that is popular that you can buy again and Mhmm. It's very inconspicuous. Right? It's just sitting there in the on your bookcase. I like I like that, that concept.
[00:42:27] McIntosh:
No. That's actually now I'm just thinking about that. That's pretty slick. And there's zero people who would figure that out. Like, that just
[00:42:37] Kenshin:
No. And if your seed phrase is compromised, they they don't know what to do with it.
[00:42:44] McIntosh:
Yeah. Because the book title is not on there. Yeah. I mean, you would literally have to piece that. Even if somebody looked at those washers and said, oh, I know what that is. If you didn't have the book title on the washers Yeah. Yeah. They're not I mean, okay. I'm a book person. Sorry. Yeah. They're not gonna find it in my collection. I promise you. Okay? The police will have shown up before they get done. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just my Tolkien books.
[00:43:16] Kenshin:
Yeah. I I I don't know what happens if you put that in a script and say, compare these to all the popular books and compare it with a list of those 2,048
[00:43:29] McIntosh:
words. I don't think the books are indexed like that. They're not Yeah. Not by page.
[00:43:35] Kenshin:
Not by page. You're right. I don't think so.
[00:43:39] McIntosh:
Yeah. Because books change size, formats. I mean, they're not all the same. Right. Right?
[00:43:47] Kenshin:
I
[00:43:48] McIntosh:
Mhmm. It's interesting. It's interesting. Yeah. It's interesting. That's pretty cool. And you could send your kids on a treasure hunt. Yeah. Exactly. Okay, kids. Go find dad's favorite book. Oh, god. It's the history of Middle Earth again. Just kidding. Which volume was it? Which volume was it? He's always talking about the trees in the vising guard. Again, that's the one I'm working on right now. I think that's volume seven. I'm not sure. Anyways, it is the treason of Isengard.
[00:44:19] Kenshin:
Okay.
[00:44:20] McIntosh:
What else? Yeah. I think we talked most about it. I mean, you gotta worry about fire. You gotta worry about flood. You gotta worry about your natural whatever your natural disasters are, whether that's tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, or earthquakes. Right? Unfortunately, you know, those are the things you gotta think about. You gotta think about keeping it safe from bad guys, whether that's people who break in your house or potentially I mean, I don't know. Whatever your family situation is, those those are things you gotta think about. Otherwise, you're at risk, and this stuff is too important.
If you're not willing to do that, then frankly, you should probably go buy buyBitstock or whatever it is that's the, I don't know. You know what I mean?
[00:45:12] Kenshin:
Yeah. And every six months or so, just try to verify that everything is where you placed it, and it hasn't faded
[00:45:20] McIntosh:
or damaged or something something. It is work, but it will give you peace of mind. Mhmm. Okay?
[00:45:32] Kenshin:
Yes.
[00:45:33] McIntosh:
Mistakes. I like this. Yeah. Let's talk about this.
[00:45:37] Kenshin:
Come on, mistakes. Yeah. I mean, of course, we said about never store anything digitally.
[00:45:44] McIntosh:
I was thinking about this very case, and I could not remember this Reddit user. They lost 7 Bitcoin. So almost a million dollars in today's money when their Google Photos backup was compromised in '20 they took a picture of their seed phrase with their Google phone or whatever Samsung. That backup was compromised, and they lost their Bitcoin. Because the reality is if somebody finds that, then they all they gotta do is plug those letters into a wallet. Yeah. I saw sorry. One more thing really quick. A video of an officer who'd pulled somebody over, and this was a long time ago. They they barely they, like, they did not know what Bitcoin was. They had no idea.
And they were looking through the guy's wallet, which I don't know why that was going on, but setting that aside. And they pulled out this thing, and it was on the officer's camera. That's what got out. And it was the seed phrases. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:47:00] Kenshin:
Yeah. I don't care your seat first with you. Oh, I don't have today with me. I have a watch. A Casio maybe I shouldn't say that. Don't say that. Don't No. No. I I I posted it on the street. It's okay. It's a Casio watch where you can store names. Okay. It has a keypad and you can store 25, contacts Right. Contacts. And it's offline. It has a battery that lasts ten years. So what do you do with a device like that? 25 words capacity there.
[00:47:38] McIntosh:
Very cool. I'm testing. Alright. Anyways, let's move on. We're getting we're getting along.
[00:47:48] Kenshin:
No. I mean, there are plenty of, house fires reported. I mean, human errors, you make a typo or something. The
[00:47:59] McIntosh:
California wildfires that happened a few months ago, there was a case where the paper backup was in a filing cabinet in the house. Probably relatively safe from burglary. Right? But not from wildfires, not from a house fire, which is what happened. Right? And, I mean, house fires happen. They they do. And it's something you need to think about. So they lost that. They donated it to the rest of us is what they did. But yeah.
[00:48:33] Kenshin:
And there has been also cases with, over engineering your backup. Yeah. Those we said those multisig or those Shamir secrets sharing, break it down to too many piece, too many locations, then maybe you don't figure it out correctly or your family members.
[00:48:51] McIntosh:
Or you think you're smart enough to devise your own backup system. And I don't wanna call people out. Right. But there is someone in the Bitcoin ecosystem, rather prominent person, who built their own backup system and lost 200 Bitcoin to it.
[00:49:12] Kenshin:
Oh. Mhmm. Yeah. I think there are plenty of disaster stories out there to learn from.
[00:49:21] McIntosh:
Don't make it too complex. Don't have a single point of failure as we would call it in the IT world. You do you need to remember redundancy, at least two copies. They do not need to be in the same location. I think that's well, I would think that's obvious, but don't keep them in the same house. Yeah. So what should people do? I don't know. Can you show us I'm just kidding. Alright. So sit down. Yeah. Figure out where you're at. Can you as you said here, can you find all your seat phrases backup? Seed phrase backups in under two minutes? I know I can, actually. Now there are some things that I promise you that I'm not the way they should be on this list, but I do know where my seed phrases are.
And it's not because they're sitting out in the open. Why that? Well, I don't know. A fire, or you had just had to leave in a hurry, an evacuation. Right? Alright. So what's the easiest way to get started? Pen and paper, essentially. Right? Yeah. And you've got that listed on here?
[00:50:40] Kenshin:
Yeah. Pen and paper. I would say again that type of paper that is at least waterproof and a permanent pen, that's good. If you have a little bit more budget and you don't need much, I've seen some, Bitcoin products that are over $50. You can just buy a metal piece of plate. You can it doesn't need to be titanium either. Stainless steel is more than good enough to survive a house fire as long as it's two millimeters Okay. Thick and more. So you can buy two two millimeter thick, stainless steel from somewhere that is not Bitcoin related and buy a stamping tool. So the plate can be, like, $510 max and, stamp tool the same, $10 or something. So for around 20, you can have a good very, very good backup that would last decades or more.
Yeah. That that's the minimum. You at least need to do a metal backup, I would say. And then,
[00:51:43] McIntosh:
we you need to make sure that you do a recovery
[00:51:48] Kenshin:
regardless of how you backup. Test yeah. You need to test your backup and keep testing it and keep showing it to at least one family member.
[00:51:58] McIntosh:
Just not the one that's mad at you. Yeah. Sorry.
[00:52:02] Kenshin:
Yeah.
[00:52:04] McIntosh:
Not when they see the price going up. Alright. I like what you have here about when you should upgrade. For paper backups, less than a thousand dollars. That sounds pretty good. Metal backups for a thousand to 50,000, and then multi sig for 50,000 plus. My only thing I would say about this is, and we've said this a couple times lately, right now, you may have, say, $10,000 of Bitcoin. Four years from now, that may be, that may be a 100,000. That's a 10 x. It can happen. And you always need to think ahead because we forget things. If I had personally, if I had kind of in the upper half of that metal backup, 25 to 50 k, I personally would be thinking about multi sig. That's just me.
Because Yeah. It's July 30. Kenshin is going to lose the bet that we do not have, and Bitcoin in the next two months is going to be hitting $1.50, or more. I guess that's my prediction, and he's shaking his head, ladies and gentlemen. You should see it. You're going down now. I'm sorry. It won't go. Just the price literally won't go down, Kenshin. Have you been watching?
[00:53:32] Kenshin:
I know. It's gonna go sideways until September.
[00:53:37] McIntosh:
Hey. That's the fun of it. We'll see. But Yeah. I mean, seriously, by the end of the year, I think we're well beyond where we're at right now. And I don't, you know, this stuff takes a while. So be thinking about that. Alright?
[00:53:54] Kenshin:
Yep. Yeah. And we can just close with this, closing thought that's yeah. Bit in Bitcoin, you're your own bank. So you really need to make, to take into consideration the the backups and and how you store everything and how you operate that said bank. Right? So it's your responsibility. It's it's and it's not not only for you, I would say. It's, for your family as well. And future generations as we like to say here. Yeah. And,
[00:54:27] McIntosh:
Yeah. And that's heavy, but it brings a lot of freedom with it. Alright. Very cool. Do we have a question? That is not a question. That's an old question.
[00:54:44] Kenshin:
No. I mean, how how do people deal with, the backup? And they don't have to say what they do for backup, but do do they follow some of those steps? I I know I usually do it in the summers. Do you have some sort of timeline you do that? Or do you worry about it? Do you procrastinate? Do you postpone?
[00:55:07] McIntosh:
My problem is I just get so busy that it just whatever it was is what it was, and it I don't think about it. And then I wake up and go, oh, wait. Maybe I need to maybe I need to update that. I I am fortunate in that I'm using my my wallet, seed signer, enough that I'm not gonna forget how to use it. Okay? But, yeah, there are things that I definitely should be doing at this point that I am not. So I appreciate, this just for that. You could have saved my family a literal fortune. Thank you, Kenshin. Right. Not that I have that fortune now just in case anybody's listening. Yeah. Yeah.
I wished. Alright. I wished, but if I did, you wouldn't know. So what does it matter? I'm telling you, man. How will you know when Macintosh makes it? I might actually drive him a newer truck.
[00:56:17] Kenshin:
You will stop doing podcast.
[00:56:19] McIntosh:
I don't know. You know, I sometimes it feels like abuse, but after four years, I think I would have stopped by now if I was gonna stop.
[00:56:30] Kenshin:
Right.
[00:56:32] McIntosh:
To have it. It's amazing how many people have come and gone in the last four years. It's hard. Podcasting's hard. It is.
[00:56:41] Kenshin:
People think that this is Consistency is hard. Yeah. Fun and games and I mean,
[00:56:47] McIntosh:
I don't know. Alright. Hey. Are we supposed to talk about the price of Bitcoin? Do we have it? Do we know it? What is it? I have it. I I did update it. You're
[00:57:00] Kenshin:
yeah. So how much is in dollars?
[00:57:04] McIntosh:
A 117,800.
[00:57:06] Kenshin:
Yeah. And euros is around 102,500. So we're we're above 100 for the last few weeks. It's great. It's bad for my DCA, but it's great.
[00:57:17] McIntosh:
Yeah. That kinda stinks. I go and strike and look. It's like, man, it's less sats this week than last week.
[00:57:24] Kenshin:
Yeah. I don't look at the Bitcoin price anymore. I just see the strike notification every morning. It's like, oh, this is how much you stack today. That's right. You do it daily, don't you? Yeah. Very small amount, but still keeps me it's interesting.
[00:57:40] McIntosh:
Alright. And then the price last July 30 was actually 66,201. So we are up a insignificant 77.9%. Wow. Mhmm.
[00:57:53] Kenshin:
And Bitcoin market cap then is at $2,300,000,000,000. And gold's market cap is 23 point 200,000,000,000.0 Mhmm. Which brings the Bitcoin versus gold market cap at 10.1.
[00:58:07] McIntosh:
Yeah, baby.
[00:58:08] Kenshin:
Steady over 10. Mhmm.
[00:58:10] McIntosh:
Right now we're looking at two sets per v byte in the mempool, and I will say things are picking up. Got a couple 100 megabytes of unprocessed transactions and about 30,000, actual transactions. So that's good. That's good. Hey. Real quick. I saw that you should follow me on Nostr if you're not already. But I I posted I think it was earlier today. I don't know. My days have run together, but I reposted somebody posted a video of Dave Ramsey, who's a very famous financial person here in The United States. And I actually thought I came up with a very good post. I'm not gonna repeat it. You're gonna have to go follow me. I will say that Dave has finally said Bitcoin is, you know, he's not saying it's rat poison or something like that.
But he's still being Dave, and he just can't pass it up. He had to talk about the vol as he says, the volatility. It's like, dude, zoom out. Alright. Enough. Yeah. Follow me on Nostr. You can find out what I said there.
[00:59:23] Kenshin:
Okay. I will go check it out. I haven't seen it. You should follow me on Nostr. I am. I am. But, not it's weird. In the summer, I don't have time for social media. I don't go there so far. That's good. I'm glad to hear it.
[00:59:39] McIntosh:
I am struggling with that myself. Not that I don't have enough time. I don't, but I spend too much time on it. And one of my kids is frankly calling me out on it. Shout outs to them. And I haven't been on Twitter a whole lot. Now I you kinda say Twitter is something that we do for the podcast, but but, you know, I spent too much time on Twitter Mhmm. Frankly. So
[01:00:03] Kenshin:
No.
[01:00:04] McIntosh:
And I've gotten back. I stayed off Facebook forever, and I've kinda gotten back into it even though I I still don't post. I hate posting on Facebook. Oh, no. Alright. Hey. We've gone long enough. Let's wrap this up. Satoshi's Plebs is a value for value podcast supporting podcasting two point o. No ads, no sponsorships, just honest Bitcoin content. I deliberately avoid sponsors because even if I love a company, Seed Cider, taking their money would influence my opinion. What if something goes wrong with that company? I would hesitate to warn you. By the way, Seed Cider is gonna be on in a couple weeks. Oh. So they got a new version, and I'm a I am pumped. I I think I've already said this. I'm getting one by the end of the year. So instead, I ask, are you getting value from this show? Support it through time, talent, or treasure. You can help with, actually, chapters with transcripts, and now you will be able to help with our website. That would be great, maybe, because we'll have it on a GitHub repo.
You can stream sets. You can boost with messages, even just a 100 sets saying great show or you suck. We'll read it. Check out the apps at podcastapps.com and support Bitcoin independent media. If you like the content, I would love it if you would tell your friends about the podcast. That is the best way for us to grow. This week's music is new. Kenshin won't like it, but that's okay. It's, Electro
[01:01:39] Kenshin:
elect oh, good god. Do you want me to read it? You send it to me. Electromador,
[01:01:45] McIntosh:
with a song called Cypherpunk's Not Dead. It's kind of a little bit of electronic, I'm not sure trance is the right word, but, you know, just something different. If you don't like it, stop. That's fine. But any boosting or streaming a sat during that song will go straight to the artist.
[01:02:03] Kenshin:
Yeah. And I called it a lecture boudoir, and you laughed at it. I don't know why.
[01:02:08] McIntosh:
Well, it's a funky word. Troubadour is a word for a musician, and I'm sure that's what he's playing on. Okay. But I it just doesn't quite flow, to be honest. You might wanna think about that guy. But it's I like the song. I'm just saying. Sorry. I that's probably a little too much. Okay.
[01:02:28] Kenshin:
Yes. So thanks for being here. We hope this has been helpful, and we would love to hear from you. Find all our contact info at satoshis.plebs.com/episode-220. Stay humble. DCA sats and have a great weekend.
[01:02:43] McIntosh:
We'll talk to you all soon. Bye bye. Safe and longs not undead. Safer belongs now dead.
[01:05:38] Kenshin:
.
[01:06:50] McIntosh:
. .
Introductions and Host Welcome
Personal Updates and Projects
Website Development and Challenges
Podcast Support and Listener Engagement
Seed Phrase Backup Methods
Misconceptions About Hardware Wallets
Digital Storage Risks
Metal Backups and Economic Considerations
Redundancy and Backup Locations
Advanced Backup Techniques
Inheritance Planning
Physical Security and Decoy Wallets
Creative Backup Solutions
Common Mistakes and Lessons Learned
Practical Backup Steps and Recommendations
Closing Thoughts and Podcast Wrap-Up
