DYOR

“Don’t trust, verify” is one of Bitcoin’s foundational principles — and it applies at every level, from the technical to the practical.

At the technical level, it’s literal. Bitcoin’s design allows anyone to verify everything: the total supply, every transaction ever made, the current state of the network. You don’t have to trust that there are only 21 million Bitcoin — you can verify it yourself by running a node and checking the blockchain.

At the practical level, it means applying healthy scepticism to everything in the Bitcoin space — including things that seem authoritative.

Verify wallet software by downloading only from official sources and checking cryptographic signatures where possible. A software wallet downloaded from an unofficial source could be modified to steal funds.

Verify addresses before sending. Always. Every time. The first and last few characters at minimum.

Verify claims before acting on them. Bitcoin Twitter, Telegram groups, and Discord servers are full of confident assertions about price, security, and opportunity. Most are harmless. Some are deliberate manipulation. The filter: does the claim encourage you to act quickly, send money, or share sensitive information? That’s a signal.

Verify your own backups. Before holding significant amounts on a hardware wallet, test the recovery process with a small amount. Restore the wallet from the seed phrase on a different device. Confirm it works. Do this before you need to do it for real.

Don’t trust, verify isn’t paranoia. It’s the appropriate default posture for a system with no customer support, no fraud protection, and no reversals.

Tomorrow: running your own node — what it means and why some people do it.

— The Daily Bit