“Bitcoin Family” hides Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin in a secret vault

Didi Taihuttu, his wife, and three children settled all their assets and bought Bitcoin in 2017 when they were trading for about $ 900. Today, a family of five in the Netherlands protects most of their cryptocurrency property in secret vaults on four different continents.

“I’m hiding my hardware wallet in some countries, so if I need to access my cold wallet to get out of the market, I don’t have to fly far,” said Taifts, the Patriarch of the so-called Bitcoin family. Explained.

Taihuttu has two hiding places in Europe, two in Asia, one in South America and six in Australia.

We’re not talking about buried treasure-no site is underground or on a remote island-but the family has a crypto hiding place on CNBC from a rental apartment or a friend’s house to a self-storage site.

“I prefer to live in a decentralized world that is responsible for protecting my capital,” Taihuttu said.

There are many ways to store crypto coins.online Exchanges like Coinbase and PayPal store your tokens, but tech savvy can choose to eliminate intermediaries and keep cryptocurrencies in their personal hardware wallets.

Thumb drive-sized devices such as Trezor and Ledger provide a way to protect crypto tokens. Square is also under construction Hardware wallets and services that “make Bitcoin storage more mainstream”.

Those who choose to keep their own cryptocurrency can save it as “hot”, “cold”, or a combination of the two. The hot wallet is connected to the internet and the owner has relatively easy access to the coin so they can access and use the crypto. The trade-off with convenience is a potential exposure to malicious individuals.

“Cold storage is often a cipher whose private key (the password that allows the cipher to be moved from the wallet) has been moved to a wallet that is not stored on a computer connected to the Internet, so hackers You can’t hack into your computer, you steal your private key, “explains Philip Gradwell, chief economist at chainalysis, a blockchain data company.

According to Gladwell, exchanges often use cold wallets to protect the cryptocurrencies deposited by their customers.

A recent Chainalysis report examining wallets holding Bitcoin found that 11.8 million Bitcoins were in the hands of long-term investors, 3.7 million were lost, and an additional 3.2 million were circulating among traders, with the rest. 2.4 million shows that it has not been mined yet.

“I can guess which wallet is cold storage, because there are certain behaviors such as receiving a lot of ciphers from a single source and not sending them for a long time until they are empty at once, but to be clear. You can’t. The wallet is used as a refrigerator, “Gradwell explains.

For the Taihuttu family, 26% of Didi’s crypto holdings are “hot.” He calls this crypto hiding place his “risk capital.” He uses these crypto coins for day trading and potentially volatile bets. For example, when you sell Dogecoin for profit and buy it back when the price of Dogecoin bottoms out.

The remaining 74% of Taihuttu’s total crypto portfolio is refrigerated. These cold hardware wallets spread around the world include Bitcoin, Ethereum, and some Litecoin. The family refused to say how much it holds in cryptography.

Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin have all risen 57%, 83% and 61%, respectively, in the last three weeks and are on the rise.

Moving Bitcoin to refrigeration is not a new idea. As long as I had Bitcoin, there was a way to keep it cold. But it requires more maintenance.

Van Phu, a software engineer at Crypto FinTech startup FloatingPoint Group, said:

Taihuttu says it’s easy to add new crypto coins to the addresses of these refrigerated wallets, but getting them is another story. To take advantage of his cold crypto, you have to physically fly to many of his hiding places.

Taihuttu wants to place cryptocurrency cold wallets on all continents, so his belongings are easily accessible.

Buried in the Swiss Alps is a vault in an abandoned military bunker that is shielded from the Internet and protected by an onsite security team. According to the digital bank’s Xapo website “I was watching the sky with a satellite.” A valuable item under the lock and guard is Bitcoin.

Coinbase purchased Xapo in 2019. This is a natural move for businesses that store 98% of their customers’ funds offline to provide “important security measures against theft or loss.”

Such a centralized vault provides certain security protections, but Taihuttu says it feels too centralized for him.

“If you want to keep your coins out of the reach of the state, you can keep those private keys directly, which is the same as burying a gold stick in your backyard,” said Castle Island Ventures General. Coin Metricco, a partner, said. -Founder Nick Carter.

As a result, Taihuttu does not use banks or post offices. “I think the risk is too high,” he said. “What if one of these companies goes bankrupt? Where is my Bitcoin? Can I access it? You again put your capital trust in the hands of a centralized organization . “

However, Taihuttu states that some centralized refrigeration companies offer significant benefits.

“They have a beautiful setup for inheritance,” he said. “When you die, these companies also handle it, and I really believe they are doing a great job.”

Phu says multi-party computing (MPC) has also proven useful in the area of ​​digital assets. This custody arrangement requires all parties to agree in order for the transaction to be completed.

This avoids the risk of storing your private key and credentials in one place. This is called a “single point of infringement”. According to Fireblocks, a digital asset infrastructure provider, MPC instead splits and encrypts the private key into shares and splits it across multiple parties.

“I think the current evolution is towards MPC,” Phu said.