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123 sats \ 1 reply \ @SatAttack 20 Aug \ on: My Bitcoin Felt Less Safe the Moment I Took Control of It bitcoin bitcoin_beginners

It gets easier. The key is to not get complacent and keep practicing. Now is the time to play with bitcoin. create, recover, and use many different self custodial wallets. I have never used bitstamp, but it should be normal even for exchanges to send you a TX ID so that you can watch your transfer in a mempool visualizer during that scary interim time. Here's an example:
dbf41dcffc64152d896f4fe90571b108a905ebfce7e3311a848b3357bc74aca8

This one is cool and simple. If you paste this into your favorite block explorer such as mempool.space we can see that the sender sent .016 BTC somewhere from a single UTXO of .066 BTC and the change was sent back to him. This TX is still uncofirmed but should be confirmed too.

Now that you have some sats offline i suggest you simply play as much as possible. Spend fees getting practice to the point where you won't be sweating when you withdraw from an exchange or move your stash or recover your stash. Don't practice with your new stash of course, you don't need much bitcoin to practice the important things.

Welcome and good luck

write
compose
2 sats \ 0 replies \ @Wazor OP 20 Aug -30 sats

Thanks, this is genuinely useful. The TXID/mempool tip alone would probably have saved Trezor Suite from about six of those twelve refreshes 😄

I think I may have skipped the “practice with small amounts” chapter and gone straight to the €1,000 final exam. No risk, no glory, apparently.

Now that I've actually been through the process once and understand what was happening, I doubt the next withdrawal will make me sweat nearly as much. But I take your point about not getting complacent. Knowing how something works once isn't the same as having the movements become second nature.

When you say “create, recover, and use many different self-custodial wallets,” do you mean setting up a few test wallets with very small amounts and deliberately practising the whole cycle : receive, send, recover from backup, inspect the TXID, etc... rather than maintaining several real wallets long-term?

That's actually the kind of practice I'm looking for. I'll keep running my scales like a Padawan with a training lightsaber.

And seriously, thanks for taking the time to give such a detailed answer. If you've got other practical little tips like the mempool one, I'm definitely interested.