Your views on single sig vs multi sig vs passphrase?
I managed to avoid getting caught in the Mt. Gox debacle by pure luck. I stuck with Kraken and Coinbase mostly during the 2016-2018 era but still wasn’t hardcore on self-custody.
By 2020 I was convinced that we’d arrived and putting some bitcoin on Voyager to earn interest was safe. I read a piece by nostr:npub17u5dneh8qjp43ecfxr6u5e9sjamsmxyuekrg2nlxrrk6nj9rsyrqywt4tp that convinced me I was wrong so I pulled my bitcoin back to cold storage and after seeing how easy it was I went and got it all off exchanges. Voyager collapsed a few weeks later. I ran into nostr:npub17u5dneh8qjp43ecfxr6u5e9sjamsmxyuekrg2nlxrrk6nj9rsyrqywt4tp In El Salvador and got to thank him in person. Saved me about a half million in today’s prices.
Bull markets make us dumb and the side effect is exchanges blow up and plebs get ruined. Self-custody is easier than ever. If you don’t self-custody, please start. If you do, find someone who doesn’t and teach them.
Discussion
If you have more than say 20% of your net worth stored in bitcoin it usually makes sense to go with a multi-sig solution assuming you have a solid strategy. Multi-sig also helps with inheritance.
But even if you store your core bitcoin in multi-sig I’d still have some amount in a wallet where you can memorize the seed phrase just to have it as a worst case scenario.
The most important things are to never store bitcoin on an internet connected device, never create a digital copy of your seed phrase(s), and never signal you are a bitcoin holder. If you evangelize make sure you know who you’re talking to and even then don’t talk specifics around your holdings.
Also have multiple copies of your phrase(s) stored in secure locations like safes and don’t store it all in one wallet.
Services like Casa and Unchained Capital are worth the price if you are in the US and planning to store the bulk of your monetary energy in bitcoin.
I honestly expect most people will use custodial services as banks and other financial institutions get more involved on regulatory inflections. Also custodial lighting just works a lot better. But IMO these would be small amounts of your bitcoin you’d use for transactions or potentially collateral for loans. Never enough that it would ruin you if you lost it.