The following transcript was created using artificial intelligence. There will be some grammatical errors below. 

00:00:03:09 – 00:00:33:26

Richard Carthon: Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of Crypto Current, your host here, Richard Carthon and today, I got a very special guest. We’ve had the company already on the show and it was absolutely incredible. It’s all about security, it’s all about digital inheritance, it’s all about being able to securely put everything away. So, as you know, back on Episode 129, we had Max with Vault 12, but today we also have another member of the group. We have Wasim. How are you doing today? 

00:00:34:12 – 00:00:36:17

Wasim Ahmad: I’m great. Richard, thanks so much for having me. 

00:00:37:02 – 00:01:13:23

Richard Carthon: Of course. Well, on the last episode that we had back with Max, you know, he came and introduced Vault 12, all the different things that you’re able to do with it. One of the coolest things I remember being digital inheritance and having a way to have all these digital aspects of Crypto and being able to store them away for your family, but today’s conversation is going to be very different, we’re going to be focusing on security and be focusing on a new project, actually, that just launched about some education around security, which I’m really excited to learn more about and to talk through. But before we get into all that funness, let’s learn a little bit more about you. Can you give us some background about yourself? 

00:01:14:17 – 00:02:07:21

Wasim Ahmad: Sure. So, I’m from London, I’m a physicist by training and moved over to the US to be an entrepreneur and be part of that whole cycle. I joined, eventually joined a company called Voltage Security, which was in the Cryptography space, which we always used to call Crypto at that time. But Cryptography was focused on a new way to do public key encryption, and it was used in email encryption. And then later, we developed some encryption techniques for securing data in the payment system. So, every time you swiped your credit card, that would be encrypted end-to-end throughout the payment system and what this achieved was when hackers went in and stole databases full of customer records, they couldn’t do anything with the credit card numbers because they were encrypted. 

00:02:08:04 – 00:02:08:19

Richard Carthon: Wow. 

00:02:08:21 – 00:02:18:25

Wasim Ahmad: So, that’s where I met Max. That’s where I met Matt and Terrence, who were the two people who introduced me to Blockchain and Bitcoin. 

00:02:20:05 – 00:02:43:11

Richard Carthon: Yeah, wow, I mean, great place to be. It’s amazing that you were able to come from a security background and then learn about Crypto and to see the implications of what it could be. I do want to spend two seconds on that. Your first introduction to the Crypto space, and like, once you learned, like, Okay, this is the thing, what excited you to be like, Wow, this is something that we should go build something for?

00:02:44:28 – 00:03:12:03

Wasim Ahmad: I mean, Crypto, it has its basis in mathematics, right? Which is the language of the Internet, it’s the language of commerce, so, there was an immediate kind of affinity to that. And while I was involved in security, Matt had gone on and created 21.co, which was the largest privately held company with the most funding at that time, turned into Earn.co and then eventually went into Coinbase. And both of them are advisors to Vault 12. 

00:03:12:18 – 00:03:58:05

Wasim Ahmad: So, I also, on that journey of learning more about Bitcoin and the Blockchain worked with the founders of Alpha Coin. So Alpha Coin, if you go back to 2012, that time frame, were the first to create exchanges. They had software that they had developed for Wall Street, it turned into exchanges. The only places that you could implement them were outside the US, in Norway and the Caribbean and places like that, a lot of compliance issues. Now, 10 years later, they’re like one of the de facto standards for exchanges. So, that was really the first kind of real working in this space. And it took me a while. I did that and then I went and did other things and then I came back to join Max in 2018. 

00:03:58:21 – 00:04:52:28

Richard Carthon: And I mean, talk about timing. So, you know, you’re at the top of what was the last bull cycle, Crypto getting all the way up, Bitcoin getting all the way up to near $20,000 and then to come into a space where you go through the bear market of 2018 to 2019 as it rolls into 2020, which starts this next bull cycle that we’re currently experiencing, the need for security I don’t think can be undermined, especially as a ton of new money is starting to enter this market and everyone is trying to quickly go and buy all these Cryptos and are trying to have access to all of these things without necessarily knowing how to secure themselves. What a lot of people, again, fail to realize, as newbies is that you are the wallet, I mean, you are the bank like you’re it, right? So, like, if someone comes and steals from the bank, steals from you, you just got stolen from there’s nothing to come and claw that back, right? There’s no like, credit card. 

00:04:53:00 – 00:05:32:24

Richard Carthon: If you have fraud or something happens, you’ve got somebody like taking care of that for you, with Crypto, if someone comes and steals your stuff, it just got stolen. So, we’re going to spend some time here and I really want you to kind of break down some true importance around security. And just like you said before you came on the show, some timely things. There are two major security breaches leading up to this conversation. So, let’s start there, like tell us about security and some basic things, first of like what people should be looking for, but then even for your people who are already in the Crypto game like things that they should be keeping their ear to the ground and make sure that they’re keeping to learn more about. 

00:05:33:26 – 00:05:54:05

Wasim Ahmad: Let me start with kind of restating what you said about you’re the bank. So, most people’s experience with financial institutions up till now is you lose your, you know, your bank password to log in to your portal, you press a button, you get a password reset, you get a code over the phone or however they do it, but someone took care of it for you. 

00:05:54:15 – 00:05:55:00

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:05:55:02 – 00:06:24:27

Wasim Ahmad: Amazing. Wonderful. You can’t do that with Crypto. With Crypto, you’ve got a seed phrase which identifies your wallet, that you have all your funds in and if you lose that seed phrase, it’s like you lost the actual cash itself. It’s like losing the combination to a safety deposit box which has gold in it. So, once it’s gone, it’s gone, you can’t get it back. No one can open it for you or retrieve it. So, that’s kind of the big, big difference that I think people, new people coming in maybe don’t understand. 

00:06:25:14 – 00:07:30:25

Wasim Ahmad: And then, if you look at, you know, what’s the default sort of behavior of people, well, they go to the, you know, they go to their favorite exchange, Coinbase, Gemini, you know, whatever it happens to be and they make it super easy, super convenient. There’s an account you set up, you can do your trading, everything’s there, there’s a balance and guess what? On those exchanges, yes, you can kind of get logged back in if you forget your credentials, the trouble is, is when you veer away from those well known exchanges to other more exotic exchanges where you don’t necessarily know the people or the, you know, who’s running it, you run into issues like not only unscrupulous owners, but just hackers saying, Oh, here’s an exchange, it’s really popular, let me go hack that because there’s a lot of money out there. And so, if you look at the stats and I was preparing this morning, you know, it’s something like since 2011, it’s something like 11 billion dollars has been stolen.

00:07:30:27 – 00:07:31:12

Richard Carthon: Oh, gosh.

00:07:31:14 – 00:07:36:12

Wasim Ahmad: From types of online institutions. It’s a huge number. 

00:07:36:19 – 00:07:37:04

Richard Carthon: Wow.

00:07:37:06 – 00:08:28:24

Wasim Ahmad: If you look at just 2020 alone, it’s something along the lines of 1.8 billion. And in the last three or four years, multibillion, four, you know, three, four billion dollars. So, just leaving your money in some accounts somewhere on the cloud is just not the best way to go because no matter how hard people work, something slips through, hackers slip through, people make mistakes. Some people commit fraud and the money disappears. Then if you look at, well, what’s the alternative? You know, what are you supposed to do? So, you’re supposed to not leave it in the exchange in the cloud, you’re supposed to bring it down into a wallet that you control. So, now you’re responsible for everything now, no one’s going to help you. 

00:08:29:19 – 00:09:21:13

Wasim Ahmad: And so, this is typically done using some type of wallet. So, it could be software, it could be hardware and you’re in control of all of the pieces, which means you have to worry about the security. In this scenario. I looked at like the top 20 wallets, top 20 software wallets and 18 of them tell you the way that you need to back up your security, back up the wallet so that you can access it no matter what happens is to write down your seed phrase, which is the main credential, write it down a piece of paper. So, that’s your protection. You have this beautiful mathematical thing called Cryptocurrency that is the native currency of the Internet and you have to back it up on a piece of paper, it’s insane. 

00:09:22:09 – 00:09:22:24

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:09:22:26 – 00:10:21:28

Wasim Ahmad: The other two wallets tell you, Okay, you can write it down on a piece of paper or you can store it up in the cloud in an encrypted form. So, they at least tell you that it’s going to be encrypted. So, that’s about it. In reality, there’s many, many more ways of backing up the seed phrase and being more secure. So, you can back it up, you can engrave it on steel, on a steel plate and put that in a safety deposit box. You can back it up on an encrypted drive that you might hold onto or you might put that in a safety deposit box. So there’s many, many ways and obviously you can use a digital vault, like we provide to back that up as well. So, it’s just so interesting that there’s like three or four different methods that are relatively straightforward for ordinary people to use and no one ever mentions them when you’re going through setting up a wallet. 

00:10:22:00 – 00:11:17:17

Richard Carthon: A couple of things I want to unpack there is, as we were talking before, you know, the show started, is alignment of why these companies or these wallets or what have you, once you get off of some of these main exchanges like Coinbase and maybe you go to like one of these wallets that have like large APYs, for example, like Celsius, right? They want to get you up and running as quickly as possible so money can come in, you can start earning your money and keep all that flowing without really necessarily explaining all the different ways that you can securely make sure that your data within the wallet is in a safe place and no one could come and take that or hack it or even you yourself lose it, right? Because, I mean, it’s not even so much that people are coming and hacking your stuff, which is definitely still a threat, it’s that people themselves are people and forget and misplace and do all that as well. 

00:11:17:19 – 00:12:19:09

Wasim Ahmad: Accidents and, you know, natural disasters, just accidents are like probably the biggest cause of losing access to funds. For sure. And the wallets, they’re not bad people, they’re just, you know, they’re just focused on getting you from, you know, setting things up, you know, without knowing how much you know about Cryptocurrency, getting things set up so that you can actually start using the wallets. And there’s this axiom in security that is security without usability is not security, you have to have usability. And so, one of the challenges that all anyone associated with custody or wallets has to deal with is how can we make this whole process usable without overwhelming the consumer with warnings left, right and center. But sometimes you just have to warn people because there’s not that kind of literacy literacy out there and that’s one of the reasons why we started. 

00:12:19:11 – 00:13:10:26

Wasim Ahmad: We created a website resource for people to kind of understand the basics of what’s involved, like why do I have to care about security in the first place? So, yeah, cloud accounts, local devices, which you can lose, safety deposit boxes are not necessarily the safest places to store anything, let alone Cryptocurrency, not even gold. How do you deal with accidents? If you’re trying to make sure that at some point your heirs should get access to the same accounts, you do need to document it and then you need to make sure they can access it at some point. There’s all these things kind of floating around and for each person, each individual investor, there’s going to be different, different combinations that’s the right, convenient combination for them. 

00:13:11:05 – 00:13:54:20

Wasim Ahmad: So, the website is SecureMyCrypto.org and we actually documented how to set up wallets, like we picked 20 wallets, we’ve documented 10 of them. The other 10 are coming online soon and we go through and wherever there’s an option, we highlight it and say, “Oh, here’s four ways of doing this particular step, you don’t have to take the defaults.” And then of course, there’s some very, very deeply knowledgeable people out there who have been doing Cryptocurrency for 10 years, 11 years and we added some articles for them, how to create a seed phrase using a calculator, how to generate a seed phrase using dice. So, these are some fun things, but we brought all of that knowledge into one place.

00:13:55:05 – 00:13:55:20

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:13:55:22 – 00:14:01:04

Wasim Ahmad: Because a lot of it is kind of spread out on the Internet and you never really know, you know, how legit some of it is. 

00:14:01:15 – 00:14:42:09

Richard Carthon: To centralize a lot of that information in one place where they can cleanly come and get it and coming from a reliable resource such as Vault 12, I think is very powerful. Education is always going to be a great place, obviously, through Crypto Current, the whole goal here is to bridge the gap between people who know nothing about Crypto with thought leaders in the space. And with you providing this education with security and even putting things in your mind, like, Wow, I can do a back up phrase using calculations on a calculator or using dice, like you just said, that just made me curious. It might be way over my head from an advanced standpoint, but can you kind of just like, break that down just a little bit? Because that just sounds really cool. 

00:14:42:18 – 00:15:39:29

Wasim Ahmad: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And by the way, we’re actually welcoming contributors onto our site. So, you’ll see articles from other people in the next couple of months. So, why why wouldn’t you use dice? So, it boils down to kind of the use of electronic equipment in generating something that’s so, so critical. And so, computers and even calculators, I guess, they’re electronic, they have chips, they’re not really able to generate random numbers, which are the thing that starts the process of giving you something that’s truly random so it can’t be calculated or brute forced in any way. So, for your average everyday use, yeah, computers going to do a good job, but, you know, if you’re putting half a million dollars worth of Bitcoin in a wallet, you might want to use something a little more serious. 

00:15:40:01 – 00:15:40:16

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:15:40:18 – 00:16:37:08

Wasim Ahmad: And so, removing the electronics from the equation allows you to do something different. And so, dice is a mechanism where you can use this to generate numbers that then can be mapped to the standard for sea prices, called Bit 39 and you can generate the words that way. And because there’s no electronics involved, the randomness of the entropy is much, much better to get you started. Now, you can’t just use any old dice. You do need to kind of check out the dice to make sure the manufacturing process didn’t introduce any biases in there, and so, there’s various tests that you can do. This very famous test called the salt water test, where you float the dice in filthy water and it gives you an indication of whether it is biased one way or another.

00:16:37:10 – 00:16:37:25

Richard Carthon: Wow.

00:16:37:27 – 00:16:53:08

Wasim Ahmad: And then you can maybe do more throws or do other things to kind of take that out. In the article, we describe a 20 sided dice. So, you know, this should appeal to anyone who played Dungeons and Dragons or any of those kinds of games in the past. 

00:16:53:10 – 00:16:53:25

Richard Carthon: Right.

00:16:53:27 – 00:17:25:18

Wasim Ahmad: But it’s just a cool technique to see how the whole system works and how you can go from dice throws to actual words. How do you make sure that the words are going to line up to a seed phrase that is actually usable? And then, we have other articles that tell you what to do with the seed phrase. How do you import it into a wallet? And how do you actually use it? Because one day you’re going back to using electronic devices to store and transact Bitcoin. 

00:17:26:19 – 00:18:24:20

Richard Carthon: That’s cool. I mean, you heard it here first, you can use dice to protect yourself. Like I just think that’s so cool and, you know, unique that you even discovered a way to get that accomplished. And that, again, is even an option. But, you know, on the website, just like you said, there’s a ton of resources that people can go and read. And you said you’re also bringing on some more contributors. So, I want you to speak directly to two different people right now, so, one, you’re brand new, you’re just getting on here, you’re kind of like baffled by all of the different ways that like you’re just now learning, like, Oh, I’m my own bank, I didn’t even realize that, what are some first steps that that particular person can do to start protecting themselves? And then on the more advanced side of, let’s say you already have some things like a Ledger wallet or a cold storage or anything else like that, what are some things that people sometimes overlook that they should be keeping top of mind? 

00:18:25:17 – 00:19:19:00

Wasim Ahmad: Yeah, sure. So if you’re brand new, you’re probably buying stuff on some well-known exchange, and that’s great and I do that, too. But then, you kind of need to understand how to move that into a medium where you can then control the security and you can make sure how you back it up. And so, typically that would involve a software wallet or some type of of wallet software. And so, there’s articles there that will tell you this is, you know, this is trust wallet, it’s the default wallet for Binance, this is how you set it up and then, these are some options that you have along the way. You don’t even have to use the seed phrase that the wallet generates, you can actually generate seed phrases through other mechanisms, including Vault 12 would generate a seed phrase for you and put it in a vault, so it’s already backed up. 

00:19:19:14 – 00:20:06:05

Wasim Ahmad: So, there’s more ways than just clicking through the setup process. So, those are kind of I think the first steps and then we have articles that explain, you know, you’re going to see this term, Bit 39. What does that mean? Why should you care? Why should you choose a wallet that kind of upfront says that they’re Bit 39 compliant? So, all of those kinds of explanations are kind of on the site right there. And then, for the advanced users, so, I think at the beginning of the year, we saw in The New York Times, right? There were two stories. One was I have three more attempts left at unlocking the hard drive, the encryption on the hard drive on which I stored my Bitcoin.

00:20:06:07 – 00:20:06:22

Richard Carthon: Yeah.

00:20:06:24 – 00:21:03:03

Wasim Ahmad: So, that person, that particular engineer did all the right things, right? He thought about, I’ve got this Bitcoin, I’ve got to protect it. He created a disk image, encrypted that disk, and then, the one thing he forgot was, Oh, but there’s a pin or there’s a password for that, I better make sure I backed that up somewhere. So, you know, 10 years ago, I mean, I don’t think we had password managers or any of those kinds of things. So, he did all the right things, but he just forgot that there’s one more layer that needs to be backed up. And I think that’s the number one danger of, great, you know, you put everything on a Ledger, wonderful. But you also need to make sure the Ledger is backed up. So, it’s where are the ultimate backups? What’s your strategy for that? And these are backups that you probably hopefully will never need to access. 

00:21:03:21 – 00:21:04:06

Richard Carthon: Right. 

00:21:04:08 – 00:21:05:20

Wasim Ahmad: But when you do.

00:21:05:22 – 00:21:08:07

Richard Carthon: But when you do, you better make sure you got them. 

00:21:08:17 – 00:21:09:02

Wasim Ahmad: Yeah. 

00:21:09:04 – 00:21:54:13

Richard Carthon: Again, I know Wasim will say, but Vault 12 could be a great way to get that done and to secure yourself and to make sure you have those things in a safe place. But, thanks for spending some time on that, breaking down some of these different ways that people can be more secure is very important. And one of the things that we bring up pretty regularly on the show is to always make sure that you are protected and you’re protecting yourself. On that note, a hot topic that’s kind of going on in the space right now are NFTs, so you have a lot of money being poured into them. And now, you’re getting people who are both creating them and purchasing them, but also have no idea how to securely store them somewhere. So, can you kind of speak to that a little bit? 

00:21:54:29 – 00:22:10:23

Wasim Ahmad: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I think you alluded to it at the beginning, like there were two hacks this weekend literally just a few days ago. One was Roll, which is a creative platform, and someone stole five million dollars worth of like creators hard earned money.

00:22:10:25 – 00:22:11:12

Richard Carthon: That’s sad.

00:22:12:00 – 00:23:28:26

Wasim Ahmad: And they took it, swapped it on Uniswap, off it went. And then, something similar happened to Nifty. Nifty Gateway, which is one of the more popular platforms for NFTs. So, there’s two areas on the NFT side. So, the first is, when you buy a NFT and a lot of people will explain that an NFT is different to Cryptocurrency or it’s different to Bitcoin because with Bitcoin, one Bitcoin is the same as another Bitcoin, but NFTs are unique. They’re pieces of art or they’re tickets or they’re diamonds or you know, whatever. Like snowflakes, that each of them is unique and can have a very, very different value. But they are registered on the Blockchain and they have a wallet address. So, they’re associated with your wallet, which you set up when you first join a platform to buy an NFT. So, in terms of making sure that that asset is backed up and you can always get access to it instead of just leaving it up on the platform, you’ve got it in a wallet. So, make sure it’s in a wallet that you control and it’s not just in a cloud wallet like what happened to the Roll people, because something bad can happen to it. 

00:23:28:28 – 00:24:21:00

Wasim Ahmad: These platforms are all new and people make mistakes. So, backing up an NFT is very straightforward, you do it the same way that you would back up Bitcoin. And so, we have articles that will describe that process. You can write it down on paper if you want, but, you know, paper burns, paper gets wet. Sometimes you can’t read what you wrote on paper, so you might want to back it up somewhere else. So, there’s a number of different things that you can do. And I think in general, as long as it’s encrypted, that’s a good start, but don’t forget to back up the encryption key. So, that’s one side of it. And then the other side is if you’re the creator and, you know, your piece of art is going to Christie’s and it’s going to be sold for one hundred million dollars, which is probably the next all time high, like in the next few months.

00:24:21:02 – 00:24:21:17

Richard Carthon: Which is wild.

00:24:21:19 – 00:24:59:09

Wasim Ahmad: Both you and Christie’s better have a mechanism for protecting that actual source file. And so, again, with something that valuable, security guards aren’t going to help, you need something to back it up into. I think people need to think seriously about what they are using to encrypt that video file and then where are they putting it? And we think our vault is a great place to put it, but there’s many solutions for this. People just are not thinking through all the scenarios.

00:25:00:10 – 00:25:41:22

Richard Carthon: People are not thinking about the security part, right? I don’t want to say It’s the less sexy part of things, but it’s very much you have a lot of these people who like want their centralized freedom, and they want to store and have the power and all that, but without really thinking through, like, Okay, well, with power comes responsibility, right? And so, how are you responsibly securing yourself and securing these assets that you’re starting to accumulate? And again, everyone listening, this is a great reminder to secure everything and if you don’t have a strategy in place, now’s the time to create one. If you need first steps on how to do that, Wasim has put out some great ways to do that. Wasim, can you say the website one more time?

00:25:42:12 – 00:25:42:27

Wasim Ahmad: It’s SecureMyCrypto.org.

00:25:45:21 – 00:26:06:13

Richard Carthon: Perfect. And you can go get some articles and start doing some first steps to put your plan in place. But Wasim, as we wrap this up, I have two more fun questions that I want to ask you, the first one being with all the knowledge that you have right now in your brain, learning everything that you have in the Crypto, Blockchain space, if you could take all of that and go and teach yourself from day one a couple of key items, what would you tell yourself? 

00:26:08:01 – 00:26:25:15

Wasim Ahmad: I think you said it, backup all of the pieces. It’s not just the seed phrase, it’s the pin on top of the, you know, it’s the password to the encryption of the file that you put on Dropbox. There’s more than one thing that needs to be backed up. So, just back up, back up, back up. 

00:26:27:22 – 00:26:47:27

Richard Carthon: So, make sure you’re backing up everything and securing yourself. The next question I have is just more of a final thought. As we wrap this up, you’ve dropped a ton of great knowledge on us today, but, as you kind of wrap and kind of put the bow on the top of this conversation, what’s something that’s final that you want to leave with everyone? 

00:26:49:19 – 00:27:35:26

Wasim Ahmad: Hopefully the Blockchain is going to continue to surprise us and delight us with, you know, new things, Cryptocurrency was one thing, NFTs is another, there’s more to come, we’re only just starting. This idea that there are things out there in the world that are digital keys that open your wallet, but they might open your house, they might unlock your car, they might do all kinds of things in the future and all of these things need to be protected. And a lot of this is going to fall on you, so, you should start thinking about how you’re going to do that and then maybe how you’re going to pass that on to future generations. 

00:27:36:12 – 00:27:53:00

Richard Carthon: Absolutely. A beautiful final thought. Protect yourself. We’re going into a digital world, so you might as well find ways to digitally secure your assets again. Wasim, thank you so much. Again, what are some ways that people can connect with you and also keep learning more about Vault 12 and everything else you have going on? 

00:27:53:15 – 00:28:09:03

Wasim Ahmad: Well, we have a great website Vault.com12. You can download the app there, there’s a bunch of videos that will walk you through why you might want to do that. We’re on Twitter and we’re on Clubhouse, so come find us.

00:28:09:05 – 00:28:24:13

Richard Carthon: Wasim and I believe you have a Clubhouse today. How can people find you on Clubhouse? My Twitter handle is Wasim A and my Clubhouse handle is Wasim A, so just find me and we’ll invite you into our club. 

00:28:25:02 – 00:28:37:08

Richard Carthon: Awesome. Well again, thank you for sharing. Everyone listening, you can also go back and listen to the first episode that we had with Max back on Episode 129. Again, Wasim, thank you so much for your time. And for everyone listening, Stay Crypto Current.