Stories · as read on the Mining station
News Surge: The Seed Phrase and the Dental Bill
The October 14, 2024 episode read a week of posts on banks, real estate and opsec, then made the case that being able to sell fast matters.
This story is an episode of the Bitcoin Radio podcast.A photo of a seed phrase in a Google Drive folder. That was the warning at the center of the Mining Disrupt News Surge for Monday, October 14, 2024.
The host read a post from a holder who believed he had lost a large share of his net worth. He had written his seed phrase by hand, taken a photo of it, and the photo synced to Google Drive. Malware and bots search for exactly that, the host said, all day and all night, and once they find it the coins are gone. In his words, "it is entirely your responsibility there is no CEO to call up."
The episode went out just over two years ago. Bitcoin was $64,882 that Monday. Today it is $80,830.
Most of the show was a roundup of the week's posts. Dennis Porter wrote that he had never seen Bitcoin coil up this much in seven years. Peter Schiff suggested Saylor's company borrow $4.3 billion to buy coins the US government was preparing to sell. Softwarm LLC described a home heater that mines bitcoin, built for about $1,000, putting out 11,000 BTU an hour and earning about $5 a day. Adam Back weighed in on a new documentary. And Marty Bent wrote that real estate as a store of value will look crazy once people understand Bitcoin's properties: finite, divisible, digital and liquid.
The host spent his closing minutes on the last of those words. He had a large dental bill to pay. He paid it without selling any bitcoin, but it made him notice something. His phone, his hat, almost everything he owned would take time to sell. Bitcoin he could sell with a couple of button presses, any time he needed to. He called that one of the most important things about Bitcoin.
He also went back to an old line: Bitcoin will be to banks what email was to the post office. He did not take it to mean banks would vanish. Post offices are still here, he said. The two will work side by side, and one will be used far more often than the other.
His closing advice was to give an hour a week to learning what money is, how the economic system works, and how Bitcoin fits into it.
The full story is on Mining Disrupt at miningdisrupt dot com, and many more like it play around the clock on Bitcoin Radio.