Orange pilled my mate down the pub last night.
Honestly, it’s so simple once you explain it properly.
I told him Bitcoin is just money you hold yourself.
He liked that. Then he asked how you hold it.
So I explained you buy a hardware wallet, but obviously not that one, and not that one either.
Then I said don’t trust its randomness, you’ll want to generate your own entropy with dice.
He said “like Monopoly dice?”
Bless him.
No, mate. Casino-grade precision dice, and verify they’re fair first, because a biased die is a biased seed.
Then I said roll it 99 times.
He asked why not fewer.
I explained that anything less than 99 rolls gives you less entropy, and while 50 rolls and 12 words is technically unbreakable by every computer that will ever exist, we don’t do technically round here. We do 256 bits.
He asked what a bit was. I told him not to worry about it.
Then I explained you do this in a room with no phone, no smart speaker, no camera, ideally soundproofed, because the acoustics of a dice roll and your keystrokes are a side channel.
He’d gone quiet by then, so I gave him a minute.
Then I said you’ll want 3 seeds, not 1, because single points of failure are what wiped out 500 people last week. So that’s 297 dice rolls.
Then multisig, 2-of-3, and you’ll need to back up the descriptor as well as the words, because 3 seeds alone won’t rebuild the wallet, and yes, that’s a fourth thing to lose.
Then I said store the 3 backups in 3 separate locations, because if a burglar or a house fire gets two, you’ve achieved nothing.
He asked where.
I said somewhere fireproof, ideally stamped in steel, definitely not the loft.
Then I mentioned the Faraday bag.
And the airgap.
And that you sign transactions by waving QR codes at a Raspberry Pi you built yourself.
And that you should rehearse the whole thing on a parallel test network with fake coins first, obviously.
He asked what happens if he gets it wrong.
I said you lose everything forever, and nobody is coming to help you.
Anyway, that’s another one onboarded. 💪