Learning how to do a few simple things with Bitcoin

How might an average, everyday person put their toe into the shallow end of the swimming pool, learning how to do a few simple things with Bitcoin?

A first step is to set aside a modest amount of money that will be used for the learning activity.  The idea is to pick some amount of money that is small enough that you would not mind if things were to go completely wrong.  I’d suggest maybe $100, something like that.

A next step is to pick a place where you will purchase some Bitcoin, and where you will hold it for just a few days while you get ready for next steps.

At about the same time, place an order for a “hardware wallet”.  This is a thing that you should not purchase “used”.  You should purchase a brand-new hardware wallet, and you should purchase it directly from its manufacturer, or through some trustworthy retailer that is reselling directly from the manufacturer.

At about the same time, you should place an order for some very sturdy and reliable way of writing down and safely storing the twenty or so words of your “seed phrase”.

Let’s go through these steps in a bit of detail.

Pick a place where you will purchase some Bitcoin, and where you will hold it for just a few days while you get ready for next steps.  I chose Strike but that does not at all mean that you must choose Strike.

The choices available for any particular would-be Bitcoin experimenter will very much depend on where the person is located.  I am in the US, and I picked Strike.  Depending on where you are located, you might need to pick some other service provider.

Having chosen Strike, I then opened an account with Strike.  They did several “KYC” (know your customer) things, including asking for a snapshot of a government ID and taking some selfies using my smart phone.  This was on a weekend.  The app said it would be a while before my account would be “active”.  I sort of imagined it might take until a business day later (perhaps the following Monday) for some human review.  But within an hour or two my account was “active”.

The next thing that I needed to do was to get some money into my Strike account.  I clicked around in the app and found “bank details” to use for sending a money transfer.  By “bank details” I mean a “routing number” and an “account number”.  The routing number is an ordinary ABA routing number, in this case 021214891 which is Cross River Bank.  The account number they gave me was a twelve-digit number which, I eventually realized, is unique to me as a particular Strike customer.

It means that if somebody were to send money to that account number and routing number, it really comes straight to my Strike account.  But the company is a bit prickly about this.  Because of their need to comply with KYC laws, they did not at all like it when (sort of by accident) the first transfer of funds happened to come from a business that I control, rather than from me personally.  It took two days of messaging back and forth before they finally agreed to “approve” that inbound transfer.  Once I realized this was apparently a problem, I did a money transfer from myself personally, and that got “approved” within about ten minutes.  I immediately clicked to convert that money to Bitcoin.

I also set up a payroll direct deposit so that a small (very small!) predetermined percentage of my paycheck would get sent to this Stripe account.  By chance I did this a few hours before a payday, and the money from my paycheck got credited instantly to my Stripe account.

I clicked around in my Stripe account to set it so that each time money came in from the payroll direct deposit, it would be automatically converted to Bitcoin.  Strike’s policy is that such conversions do not incur any fee.  (I have to assume that some sort of implicit fee gets earned through the exchange rate at which the conversion takes place.)

As mentioned above, the first transfer had gotten held up for a couple of days.  When Strike finally “approved” that transfer, I immediately clicked to convert that money to Bitcoin.

After the passage of a few days, I had some Bitcoin.  What I had accumulated was roughly one-hundredth of a Bitcoin.  This was at a time in December 2025 when Bitcoin was at around $85K, so it meant that I was in possession of about $850 worth of bitcoin.

Of course the actual value of any particular amount of Bitcoin will go up and down from time to time.  I tried not to get too wound up about noticing that my holdings had increased at one moment by $30, and then dropped in value by $40, and so on.

As I discuss elsewhere in this blog, the general view expressed by most people who have thought a lot about Bitcoin is that what one should absolutely not do is “park” the Bitcoin for any extended period of time in a place like Strike.  The general view is that one should eventually transfer one’s Bitcoin holdings (or most of one’s Bitcoin holdings) to a “self-hosted wallet”.  I will describe this transfer later in some detail, but for now I will describe some next steps.

Place an order for a “hardware wallet”.  This is a thing that you should not purchase “used”.  You should purchase a brand-new hardware wallet, and you should purchase it directly from its manufacturer, or through some trustworthy retailer that is reselling directly from the manufacturer.

I selected the Trezor 7, seen at right.  It cost $249, which is far more expensive than most hardware wallets.  You can get a perfectly good hardware wallet for $20 (the Trezor 1, on sale).  But I had decided to live it up with this very fancy Trezor 7.

The idea of a hardware wallet is that it is a very secure device that is never ever directly connected to the Internet, and that is very difficult to hack to get the information stored inside.  The device connects (from time to time) with some other device that is connected to the Internet, such as a smart phone or notebook computer or desktop computer.  You might be using an Android phone or an iPhone.  You might be using a Windows computer or a Linux computer or an Apple computer.  Lots of hardware wallets are made so that they can connect to any of those many types of devices.

What are the consequences of making what might later turn out to be an unwise choice of hardware wallet?  For example what if Trezor were to go out of business tomorrow, without warning?  What if the hardware wallet itself were to stop working without warning?  The answer would be that you shrug and purchase another hardware wallet, perhaps from the same company or from a different company.  You would then load your “seed phrase” (see discussion below) into it, and everything would be back to normal.

You could also ask “what if my hardware wallet gets run over by a truck?” or “what if it is accidentally destroyed in a fire?”  Once again, you would shrug and purchase another hardware wallet, load your “seed phrase” into it, and yet again, everything would be back to normal.

I actually made a decision to purchase a $20 Trezor 1 just to keep it around in case something bad were to happen to my Trezor 7.  It will sit untouched, maybe for years, but it will be there if I need to put it into service.

Sturdy and reliable storage of the “seed phrase”.  As you can see from the discussion above, there is this thing called a “seed phrase” that is somehow very important.  In many ways it is far more important than your user ID or password at a company like Strike, and is far more important than the hardware wallet.  Eventually, as you learn more and more about things like the hardware wallet and blockchains, you will appreciate that this “seed phrase” is something that you absolutely need to write down and save somewhere so that you can find it again later.  Not only that, you probably need to store it in some way that would still be readable even if the place where you keep it were to be destroyed by fire.  Not only that, you probably need to store it in some second location.

Storing the seed phrase.  The approach that I selected was to make use of some cards made of titanium sheet metal, shown at right.  These are about 2½ inches by 4 inches, and about the thickness of a credit card.  A set of two such cards was about $19 on Amazon.

I also purchased a stamp set, shown at right, which cost about $20 on Amazon.  The stamps stamp letters about ¼ inch tall.  I used a hammer to stamp my 24 words into the 24 numbered places on the cards.  I then stored the cards in various places.

People who think a lot about this stuff have lots of ideas about where to put such cards.  Maybe bury a card in the ground somewhere, with the idea of digging it up later if it is ever needed.  Maybe duct-tape it to the bottom of a piece of furniture.  Hide it in a book.  Send one of them to some trusted relative or friend.

After a while one catches on that there is no choice but to think about what happens if one gets run over by a truck.  Perhaps one of the cards needs to be tucked away somewhere that would be found by a loved one or descendant in the event of one’s demise.

A main point of all of this is that while the user ID and password for an account with a company like Strike is maybe slightly important, but does not actually matter so very much.  The physical location of the hardware wallet, the brand and model of the wallet, yes they are maybe slightly more important, but again they are not nearly as important as one might think.  (The wallet will be protected by a PIN number, and if somebody tries a dozen or more wrong PINs, the wallet will erase itself.)  No, the one thing that really requires some thought is where to store the seed phrase, and how to keep prying eyes away from the seed phrase, and how to safeguard the seed phrase so that even if a building were to be consumed by fire, it would be possible to find the seed phrase somewhere else, or by sifting through the ashes of the building.

Oh and whatever you do (says everyone who has thought about this), never ever put the seed phrase anywhere that is in a computer or on a USB drive or in a place that might be stored to a cloud.  No photograph of the piece of paper upon which the seed phrase was first written down.

You can find lots of places on the Internet where people compare notes on how to avoid being stupid about this.  Use an aluminum card instead of titanium?  Absolutely not, say lots of folks, because in a fire, an aluminum card will likely melt into an unrecognizable blob.  Steel?  No, steel can rust, and might be rendered unreadable by a hot enough fire?  Stainless steel?  Maybe.  But lots of people think titanium is better than stainless steel.

Transferring the Bitcoin from Strike to the hardware wallet.  The stickler for accuracy will point out that the Bitcoin do not actually end up in the wallet.  They are “somewhere out there” in some blockchain nodes that you will never see or touch but that really do contain the Bitcoin, along with lots of data that establish that you are the owner.  But it will seem as though the place where you are sending is into your newly purchased and configured wallet.

And of course you may have selected a service provider that is not Strike.  I am using the example of Strike because that is the service provider I chose.

What I will suggest is, start by transferring a small portion of your Bitcoin from your service provider to your wallet.  Stand back and watch what happens, and eventually you can arrive at some level of confidence that you succeeded at the transfer.  Maybe transfer some of that Bitcoin to a friend, and have the friend transfer it back to you.  Then maybe transfer nearly all of your Bitcoin to the wallet.  (You will probably want to leave a small portion of your Bitcoin with the service provider, because it will be a handy way to do small and inexpensive and fast transfers using “Bitcoin Lightning”.)