Then keep it simple. There is no hurry to learn every detail. Once you have your seed phrase and you're stacking your sats into the bottom of a nearby lake or river, then pace yourself, just watch a video here or there. Ask a question. Plan your next move, like how you're going to pass your sats on to future generations.
Don't Panic!
(and please keep your towel handy at all times, never know when you may need to go for a swim)
Whatever you choose to do, TEST recovering a seed first. Doesn't have to be your main wallet, go create a paper wallet or ten if you want to practice.
You will feel much better about taking any of the steps you are talking about if you've rehearsed the entire process with just enough sats to pay some tx fees if you're going to test online transactions.
No worries. When you are receiving, all you are doing is providing an address to the sender. Nothing is being signed by you. There was a fun moment of bitcoiner history when people were sending small amounts of bitcoin that had gone through some coin joining process to addresses known to be those of notable people, because exchanges (and apparently authorities) were flagging these and denying people access to their accounts. This can happen because the reciever is not a participant in the transaction.
Your software likely provided you with an address to receive bitcoin at some point. You can use (and re-use) this address without doing anything in the software. The tricky part is if you eant to generate more addresses - some people advocate using a new address for every transaction. Generating addresses is where you might want to use software, but once you have your private key, you can use offline tools to derive/generate additional addresses. I can dig up some links if you need.
On the sending side, you will need to create and sign a transaction, and broadcast that transaction so it can be mined into a future block.
Again, there are offline software tools you can use for each step of this. For signing the transaction, you migjt even want to try something called a seed signer - its a hardware device, but one you can build from scratch. When you are ready to broadcast the signed transaction, that has to be done online, but there are multiple options for how you might do this.
All of this is assuming you generated your original seed phrase with your ledger. After you did this, you copied it down to paper, and you could take that ledger and destroy it if you wanted, but still be able to use that wallet.
You may need to use the ledger live software long enough to load the bitcoin wallet app onto the ledger device, but after that it can be uninstalled and never used again.
I have a ledger nano x, was my first hw wallet. I still think it has value, but only when used carefully and thoughtfully. It is wiped clean right now, and I doubt I've plugged it in for 2+ years.
Your choice of how you use your devices is ultimately yours, but what Ledger caught heat for saying is true - ultimately on any hardware device, you are trusting the firmware developers to some extent. If you can prevent that device from ever connecting to anything that might allow it to leak your data, then you don't have to trust that the firmware doesn't leak data.
Look for ledger videos from nostr:npub1rxysxnjkhrmqd3ey73dp9n5y5yvyzcs64acc9g0k2epcpwwyya4spvhnp8. Then maybe look at some hardware videos from nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx. I was working through this for myself in 2020 and 2021, and was able to find resources then, but it has been a while. It is a deep rabbit hole to go down, fair warning.
Tldr; don't run ledgerlive software. Probably never update the firmware.
Tails.
Be as paranoid as you want. I am good with running it in a fresh VM with no virtual network device attached. Any interactions with it would have to be snooped via keylogger or some kind of screen grabber.
Next level paranoia is run it on an old laptop (with the network adapter, wifi, camera, and bluetooth all physically disconnected) from cd/dvd that I burned myself (and closed the session so it couldn't be edited)
I think there is another project - nos? Nox? Nosx? that is a live linux with some wallet and cryptography tools included.
If you run a bitcoin node, it's pretty easy to have an electrum service running, and then use an electrum client to connect to it and load up a wallet from seed, long enough to sign, generate addresses, or sign a psbt. Not surenif is more or less secure, but you could probably do the same with Sparrow wallet on desktop.
The issue I come back to is where data is at rest. If you have your wallet loaded up in a hardware or software that saves its state, then that opens a whole bunch of attack surface. If these are all cleared, reset, destroyed, so your wallet isn't saved at rest, then all your attack surface (at rest) is how your seed is stored.
This applies to multi-sig as well. I believe at least one of your required signatures should REQUIRE you to rebuild a signing device from a seed. But hey, that is me. You do you, right?
I wrote a long-form post on this topic, if this isnt long enough!
nostr:naddr1qqxnzd3c8q6ryvenxsensve5qgs9dnzu4uwa6vfpskgsax7qwvd554gev3fmg0l629g5msatladnasgrqsqqqa282veyl5
Seriously, I think it's because companies sell them to us.
It is convenient to have something to handle generating wallet addresses and sign transactions. And it is easy enough to load a wallet seed onto a hardware device (or into software) long enough to do that when needed.
But that isn't easy to understand for a novice. We're still trying to save them by getting them to move their savings away from casinos and custodians.
Any true long-term storage should be on steel or something independent of software OR hardware. I'm also liking the idea of representing seed phrases as RGB color values, and then using some kind of hillbilly steganography to encode them into an image that can be stored in decentralized storage.
This is the way. Very similar to my situation, but my wife has no savings and doesn't comprehend Bitcoin or saving. My teenagers are doing just fine, and I invest as much time with them as they will allow me to.
This changed when I stopped buying prepared foods and just bought meat and a few other ingredients that required cooking.
Only if you want to save it. More important, put all your time you want to save into Bitcoin.
Nah, just carve your own dice, build a basic abacus, and get to hashing!
What if I were to tell you - the dating/age of those structures is off by an order of magnitude or more, and the civilization that we assume may have built them only used (and possibly defaced) them.
The earlier civilizations were more technologically advanced than us, but also likely didn't originate here. We likely didn't originate here either, although we were genetically adapted to this planet's environment.
We are just getting a glimpse of some ruins of civilizations that have been largely erased from this planet, whether by time, catastrophe, or design.
And the temporal bits? By making material change to the mass or composition of the planet, you will make significant changes to its orbit, which changes the length of its year. Also its rotation would likely be different, meaning its length of day changes. When that solar cycle changes, the way things oxidize and age changes.
Our dating systems assume rates of decay based on current conditions, and I have no confidence those conditions remained the same, even 10k years ago.
It is just more hubris, assuming we are the only intelligent species not only in space, but in time. We're making the same mistakes of heliocentrism when it comes to the mechanics of time, and I haven't even opened up the box of quantum mechanics yet.
Also, reality (fabric of space/time) isn't real. It is simply how WE have evolved to experience reality. This isn't really matrix shit, much simpler and more fundamental than that.
Gm #nostr.
May go to the river later.
That's a great idea! Also, I generally dislike any terms of service that restrict multiple accounts. So glad #nostr doesn't have TOS. In life, we often have multiple versions of ourselves that we present, depending on the situation (and the people). No reason this shouldn't be the case here!
Eh, be true to yourself, I suppose. You ain't gotta lie ta kick it.
Gn #nostr. I will probably be lurking for a bit, though.
Today was a bit of finding out about how much I intentionally disregard, or see it and dismiss it as something I don't care about. Like the lightning network. Yes, I use it. But I really don't care that much about it. And that is a good thing, it should become so common and second-nature that I don't feel any need to spend time thinking about it.
Same goes for institutions. Just don't really care. They can all go piss up a rope.
And then there are things that "society" thinks I shouldn't care about. As a married man, I shouldn't really care about the attentions or physical form of any other female. But guess what, I do care. Sorry society, not sorry. This doesn't diminish what I feel for my wife, if anything it amplifies it. I will happily continue platonically zapping and interacting with both men and women, although I may be slightly biased toward women.
Cheers gang. Probably going to be a long night, but I'll be here tomorrow if I have my way.
What did I eat today?
Shrimp - 12oz bag, with a fee dashes of tabasco
Sausage - 16oz roll
Top Sirloin - 2lbs
Pork rinds - not much, maybe 2-3oz
Butter (unsalted) - 2 tbsp
Coffee
Water
La Croix, 1 can
Milk? Very little.
Yes, that is almost 4lbs of proteins, but I probably won't eat much over the weekend.
I rode my motorcycle again today.
You'll probably get tired of me saying this, but this is my note.
And I am learning how to ride my motorcycle. One day at a time.
For those who want more than just words, here's a picture.