Well this week was sure a kick in the pants to organize my crypto. Here’s what I’ve learned:

My strategy to not put it in one spot was actually good, cuz I was able to access some of it. While some wallets/services were dead and I lost some seeds, I was able to get to some of it to use. Drawback: didn’t remember where all it lived.

Hardware wallets are a great idea but if you’re in it for the long haul, they become unsupported by the company. It took a long time to figure out how to get it working to load a seed phrase in, and none of the seed phrases I had saved matched. Oops.

Have trading accounts everywhere. They don’t cost anything to open, and if one service isn’t to your liking, you can have options. Lots of friends this week discovered their doge were on exchanges and tipbots that no longer exist.

Given the number of wildfires on the west, and if you are the type of person to store any passwords on paper, switch to metal. Cryptosteel makes cool stuff for this. Digital password managers are also your friend. Mostly just don’t be lazy, that play money you had might go up.

I think the worst part of all this was forgetting to send people crypto and having to scramble to figure out who was supposed to get what, from transactions at least 4 years back. Don’t let that shit lag.

You need to treat digital asset management like spring cleaning on your home. A lot of us knew what we should be doing, but it’s boring and there’s never urgent pressure to actually do it. If taxes didn’t have a deadline + consequence, nobody would sit around and sort that out.

If you were using a wallet that required you downloading the whole chain and haven’t touched it in years, download the latest one and look for a recent torrent of the chain. Doge had this and many remembered too late.