🚨Attención🚨
*Important noob stuff here*
Do NOT leave your satoshis in a custodial wallet. After all, there’s no such thing as physical satoshis - only keys to unspent transaction outputs on the #Timechain aka the distributed ledger aka the Bitcoin blockchain.
This means sats on an exchange like (shit)coinbase, River, Strike, Cash App, etc. are technically outside of your control. Very bad news! Imagine if it was FTX for example. Rekt. But any of these platforms can lock your account if they perceive you as a risky customer regardless of absolute implosion a la FTX. Ao you want them off, and under *your* personal safekeeping.
“But how,” you ask? Ideally you’d get a reliable hardware wallet/signing device (whatever you wanna call it). No matter how noobish and dumb you think you are, I guarantee anyone capable of using Nostr can also operate a hardware wallet. It’s really not that hard I swear.
Maybe that’s too much for you right now. Perhaps you went stacked so hard these past ~9 months (like a fucking legend) that you have no cuckbucks to spend on a good one like a #ColdCard. Figure that part out and just get one ASAP.
Right now, this very moment, you can install a free wallet on your smartphone. My favorite is Bluewallet. People will tell you Muun is perfect for noobs, but imo they’re wrong. Whatever you choose, just be sure you’re not getting scammy fake shit with no reviews. It also shouldn’t collect any data from you, should let you choose your own miner fees, and *must* enable you to get your seed phrase.
With Bluewallet you can go to settings and turn on “Advanced Mode” which allows you to make your own entropy for an on-chain Bitcoin wallet. Put on your tinfoil hat and turn your phone on airplane mode, then flip your coins or roll your dice (you’ll see what I mean - actually do it though, no cheating).
Write down the seed phrase it produces, which is just 12 or 24 words. Legibly. Somewhere you’ll always be able to find but not anyone else. Think of this as an emergency backup kit that uniquely identifies your public/private key pair and can restore your access to all sats in the wallet even if your phone explodes tomorrow.
You can make as many of these as you want. Even make the first one as a test you’ll never deposit sats into if you want. By now you can turn off airplane mode btw.
Congrats, you just enabled yourself to take your bitcoin off the exchanges. One step closer to being a sovereign individual with unconfiscatable, undebaseable money!! ✊✊✊
Delete the wallet you just made and then restore it. Make sure it works. Do a small test transaction into and back out of it (gfy inscriptoors 69 blocks waiting in the mempool as of writing this). Realize it’s pretty dang easy, get comfortable with it. Look at how many different addresses your xpub contains. Check out coin control (UTXO labeling/management), start to understand what a UTXO even is and what sizes feel good for you.
Cutting myself off here… ish
These are the first steps towards being a true “peer” in the p2p electronic cash system known as #Bitcoin. Eventually after you achieve this you will start to wonder how those wallet programs interface with the Bitcoin protocol and realize you gotta to run your own node. Baby steps, lfg.
TL;DR - get cold storage ASAP, but in the meantime consider holding your sats (temporarily!) in a non-custodial hot wallet such as Bluewallet. Semi-detailed instructions for this in the wall of text above.
Anyone can do this stuff. Especially you 😗
And if you don’t, you’re letting someone else hold your sats, which sounds a lot like a bank…
What’s kinda the whole point of Bitcoin again?👇 
