The Experience That Motivated Me To Apply To Unchained
I listened to an episode of The I.T.Career Podcast. One of the guests claimed anyone who wanted to get an IT job can get one today if they know where to look. Most people apply for a job on Linked in or Indeed. This guest to try a different route. Look at a cybersecurity conference like Black Cat(or whatever sector of IT you want to break into). Look for companies that are on the third tier of advertising instead of the top companies because there is less competition. This is essentially the same thing Malcolm Gladwell said in his book David and Goliath. You want to be a big fish in a small pond.
I applied this advice to the bitcoin conference website. I started following all the bitcoin-only companies because those are the only companies I really want to work for, aside from like Fidelity because I would like to learn how to secure billions of dollars worth of bitcoin. Fidelity is an example of a large Pond. Exxon Mobile, another sponsor of the bitcoin conference, is another big pond. I’m not likely to get a job with Exxon Mobile’s Cybersecurity team, but I might have the experience to work for a Start Up like Unchained Capital.
I also did one of those self-help programs in 2020. I had a lot of time on my hands, for obvious reasons. The idea was to write what you want your life to be like in five years if you could have everything you want. I took it seriously. I don’t want a new car, bigger house, or fancy pants. I want to get paid in bitcoin and work for a bitcoin company who accept people immersed in the bitcoin culture. Many people in IT still see bitcoin as a currency for drug dealers, black hat hackers, and degenerate gamblers. I would rather work for people who will not only accept me for who I am, but for people who also share my values. At the end of the day, that’s all bitcoin is. It is a store of value that can be used as a medium of exchange. Most of the world does not value this form of money, presumably because few understand it. I want to work with the few who do understand it.
I Know What It Feels Like To Lose Your Bitcoin Password
At the time, I also had my stack on a Trezor One bitcoin wallet in a safe deposit box at a bank. My passphrase was kept in a safe at home. I thought this was a great security plan because even if someone broke into my house and stole my passphrase, I had a few backups of it and could still recover my bitcoin. I knew the bank could ostensibly be robbed, but the likely hood of someone breaking into a bank vault and stealing my Trezor seemed slim. Since I wasn’t working during the pandemic, I thought it would be a good time to review my security setup.
I called the bank. They were closed. I drove to the bank. Nobody was there. For the first few months, I had no way to access my bitcoin. The world shutting down was not in my threat model. Eventually, the bank posted a sign on the door informing their safe deposit customers that if they need to access their safe deposit box, they can make an appointment. I had to wear a mask, but I was able to retrieve my Trezor.
First, I tested my seed phrase recovery. It passed with flying colors. Then I typed in my passphrase, but something strange happened. I had a zero balance. This must have been a mistake. I had my passphrase memorized. I wrote it down. How could this be? It eventually occurred to me that I must have either written the passphrase down wrong or I had some type of typo. After the initial panic, I searched for solutions. I found BTC Revover This tool made it easier to recover coins that may otherwise get lost if you had a typo in your passphrase. I recently learned this is called a dictionary attack. This is when someone tries many iterations of a common password like
`
- P@ssword1
- Password1
- password1
- P@$$w0rd1
- ...
`
This worked and I was able to recover my stack. It turns out I added a space in between two words. This experience taught me why someone who uses these so called “hacking tools” might have a legitimate reason for doing so. Ethical hacking therefore seems like a valuable skill to have.
I spent the next 89 months learning everything I could about bitcoin multisig. I perused the 10X Your BTC Security Guide for months and experimented with many different multisig set ups. I tried Specter Desktop, and Unchained Capital’s Caravan. I tried editing the descriptors to make these two wallets compatible with each other. I thought of all of the worst case scenarios. What would I do if my bank closed due to a pandemic? What if my safe deposit box was blown up in a Civil War? What if I needed to flee the country? I went into full on bitcoin prepper mode, weighing trade offs. This is where the majority of my Cybersecurity experience comes from.Now I use many advanced bitcoin tools like Seed XOR and Shamir Secret Sharing. I have experience with Final Message, a dead man's switch that encrypted messages using AES encryption. It can best be described as ethical hacking ransomware.
How To Use Ransomware As An Ethical Hacker
Most ransomeware encrypts important data and offeres the private key to decrypt this information for a fee paid in bitcoin. Unfortunately, this is what the most people think is bitcoin's only use case.This is the stuff I her about in my regular job during Cybersecurity training. Final message works the same way as those ransomeware attacks you hear about on the newsm but it is used by the defender instead of the attacker.
You encrypt a message. You give the key to decipher the message to your heir. You pay the monthly fee. This differs from a ransom in that it is voluntary. You encrypted the message with your consent.Ransomeware differs in that you must pay the ransom to obtain the keys. That's not what this is because you or your spouse already have the key. You pay final message to NOT send the encrypted AES cipher text. If you pay for 6 months, no one will have access to this key no matter what.If you get hit by the proverbial bus, you will not be able to pay the fee and the message will be sent to your spouse if you do not pay the fee. This means we can use public key cryptography to pass our bitcoin to our heirs. Too bad we don't hear more stories like this on the news.
Final Message unfortunately shut down it's operation, but it was a great idea and it's open source. Casa has implemented somethign simmilar and I think this will be implemented by more companies like Unchained in the near future. I want to be one of the people who helps make this happen.I also think tools like nostr can make this process easier given that private nostr NIP04 messages are AES encrypted.
The Five Year Plan I Wrote 5 Years Ago
I decided I wanted to work for a bitcoin company and described what I would like to do. I wanted to help other people learn how to use bitcoin. One of the things this experience taught me is that I could be in the top 5% of people who understand how to use bitcoin and other forms of public key cryptography, but no matter how good I get, my wife is terrified of this stuff. She is very reluctant to learn and I know I am not the only Bitcoiner with this problem because I have talked to many bitcoiners about this. So I wrote down that I could see myself working for the concierge service at Unchained Capital on my self-help writing program. I decided this was the job I wanted to start with to begin my bitcoin career, but at the time, it would have required me to move to Austin, Texas and that is not a viable option for me.
After looking through the Bitcoin Conference sponsors I decided to give Unchained Capital another look. They are called Unchained now. I looked at their jobs section at unchained.
The customer support associate sees like the exact job I wrote down for my 5 year plan. This job also has benefits and will allow me and my family to stack more sats, get paid in bitcoin, and it even comes with benefits like a 401K, medical insurance, and dental insurance. This is the equivalent of a help desk job for bitcoiners that requires knowledge of specialized computers. I have acquired much of this knowledge. My sister-in-law says I am a bitcoin expert. I would never use the word expert. I don’t think anyone but Satoshi can call themselves an expert, but the job description is within my realm of expertise.
So I applied to Unchained last night. I’m keeping my fingers crossed because This is the job I want to do. It was the goal I wrote down. I know it won’t all be fun and games. People who call might have had the worst day of their life. I can empathize with them if they lost a key, but I know some people might have lost more and are in grief. I think my unique skill set has the potential to be very valuable for these people and their families. That’s why I applied to Unchained. I feel as if it’s a calling and what I was born to do.
https://marcleon.work/pgp
862,396
As Seen on TOR:
http://p66dxywd2xpyyrdfxwilqcxmchmfw2ixmn2vm74q3atf22du7qmkihyd.onion/the-experience-that-motivated-me-to-apply-to-unchained/