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It’s difficult and scary to take responsibility for your money. I had a shocking scare today. I’ve got my bitcoin in cold storage and have the pass phrases stored securely in 2 different countries. I hadn’t checked my bitcoin for about 6 months. I was confident it was safe but today I thought I’d better check things. So I went and retrieved the hard wallets and checked. ZERO Bitcoin. The panic I felt at that moment was awful. My fingers were shaking while I ejected and rechecked. Still ZERO. I was beaten. I just sat there for 10 minutes and without hope I checked again. And this time it was there. I checked again and still there. I must have typed the pin wrong. But it scared the shit out of me. Banks here are custodying btc and I’m REALLY tempted to give it to them (for annual fee of 0.5%). But not yet. I just needed to share this. And maybe get opinions.

Be careful out there.
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billybigpotatoes 4mo ago

Set up a 'watch only wallet'. You only need the xpub/zpub. Then you can keep an eye on it without having to do a full 'wallet restore'. Also - to avoid heart attacks - write down the derivation path as well as your 12 or 24 words.

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msktime1 4mo ago

Why not just look at the address on the bitcoin address tracker site?

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billybigpotatoes 4mo ago

The method of just writing down the address and checking it on a block explorer works fine if all your funds are parked at one address. If youve used your wallet a few times and so have generated change addresses, then using the 'master public key', which can check all addresses at once, works best.