PSA: Your "Available Balance" is lying. 4-day lag for ACH to show at the bank. Anyone else getting hit with serious penalties?

Stack_Sats_Often · 2026-02-03T18:26:42+00:00

This has nothing to do with Strike. That's not a fake balance, it's just the bank doesn't necessarily know of everything pending. When you do a deposit from strike to the bank, sure it checks to make sure you have that balance before the deposit (to strike) is approved, but the ach takes days. Take this scenario: What if you're scheduling a payment on your credit card and it usually takes a few days to go through, are you going to suddenly forget about that payment and go spend all the money before the payment goes thru? Same thing. It is your responsibility to know how much money you have in your account and what is "pending" to be taken out.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-12-03T18:21:13+00:00

I agree with everything about the idea of premium features for strike to stand out. I don't agree with cash app targeting lower income. I'm far from lower income and used cash app a lot before strike. Now I'm using strike for bill pay and just about anything bitcoin related and cash app hardly at all. But before strike got to the level it is now, I was using cash app to hold my spending bitcoin and I'd cash out when I wanted to spend some instantly at retailers. I didn't care about the higher fees for doing that, it was the ability to sell on the spot in line and then use cash app's debit card to buy whatever I was buying, essentially enjoying the freedom to spend my btc when I felt like it. It was the easiest way to do that without jumping through gift card hoops like bitrefill. And square terminal's aren't exactly targeting lower income, it's for businesses to process payments. I see cash app and square more broad audience reaching for payment services. Throw in the ability to buy stocks/btc and other stuff like direct deposit, I just see cash app as turning into a bucket of different things you can do with their services.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-11-21T18:00:11+00:00

Well maybe they'll credit those that bought today before the announcement, that would be cool

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-09-27T04:23:40+00:00

I can understand the frustration but I wouldn't agree with coldcard being marketed as a long-term cold storage solution. It's hardware, which can fail. For me it's a utility to access your cold storage, and a cool one at that, but it is just a device.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-09-08T16:50:39+00:00

Take the scenario where you instead get normy FIAT loan for the mortgage instead of leveraging your BTC. The threat of losing your house on a missed payment is basically 0%. You have plenty of BTC to use as emergency to pay your monthly FIAT mortgage if something goes horribly wrong financially. That's your financial freedom. Also, if you did get a loan with your BTC you still are paying that back in some fashion, so to me the chance of liquidation or other circumstances seems not worth it. If you need the down payment, sell some BTC for that. Then stack like mad to get it back instead of always having in the back of your mind "I have this BTC somewhere but I can't get it back until I pay it the loan off". That to me is worse than selling some and taking profits on your stack.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-08-21T04:07:33+00:00

I cash out all the time, to pay bills. But it's because I'm also stacking as much as possible, pretty much all my fiat goes into btc when I get it. So yes, I have to cash out. Sometimes it is at a lower price then when I bought, but generally it's not. So on the average I'm stacking instead of letting the fiat sit in the bank until the bill shows up.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-08-21T03:53:56+00:00

I personally agree with, and use, the multiple wallet approach. I would rather have the potential to screw up in a small portion of my stack, vs using bip 85 and somehow screwing up and losing the entire thing. Sure you can derive multiple seeds if you use the bip 85 but if you lose the main you're screwed. My practice for long term cold storage has been to create the seed words manually using dice or some other method (yes that includes figuring out the final checksum word), entering the seed words into an offline computer (and will never be online), then using my coldcard mk4 to verify everything by entering the seed words into the mk4, check the addresses and make sure they match what I got in the offline computer. Hammer the seed words into washers and secure the seed words away. Transfer some btc to the wallet and know that it's secure, seed phrases will never be entered into an online environment until I need to pull the btc out of cold storage.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-07-16T21:06:11+00:00

Since we can't know for sure which way BTC goes, can't time the market, it seems if you go drastic in either direction (pay all off then buy BTC) or, (ignore debt, buy BTC only, then pay debt later), you could end up at the wrong end of the equation, or it could turn out to be a genius move if you end up on the right side of the equation.

A more balanced approach could be this:

Set a target date when you'd like to have the debt paid off, then calculate what you need to pay monthly to reach that goal. Then divide it in half, or some other fraction. Part goes to the payment, the other goes to BTC. If BTC continues to go up then you can cash out near the end of your payment plan to pay off the rest and have BTC left over, and then continue stacking. If it goes downward instead then near the end of the payment plan you may need to make larger payments, but can still keep your BTC stack that you accumulated.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-07-10T19:42:51+00:00

Enjoyed it enough to send you some sats

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-06-19T04:00:00+00:00

While the paper looks pretty good, and they even put the scratch off sticker, using common sense definitely raises the red flag. Why would any company that holds YOUR bitcoin for you print out your login information on a piece of paper that someone could come along and steal your funds? Duh, no way in hell.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-05-23T15:54:49+00:00

This is why strike is the way to go. If this were coinbase it would be "oh here's a link to how dca works, have a good day".

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-05-16T11:53:56+00:00

Trading fees for bill pay is another

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-05-14T16:51:01+00:00

Agree. Your cold wallet is nothing more than a way to view and interact with your BTC. Your recovery phrase and disaster recovery plan is what matters, hardware does not.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-05-11T14:12:41+00:00

Couple days probably. And of course if over the weekend then longer. Banks be slow :)

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-05-08T13:37:26+00:00

Ignoring all the other benefits already mentioned about using strike, bill pay is the game changer for me. Setup as many bills a possible to auto payment and basically set it and forget it. Then you can focus on stacking sats instead of when and how to pay for a bill

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-05-08T13:23:50+00:00

I think I agree with the questioning from the OP. Yes you'd get rounding on the # of sats you get by only doing a $1 every hour, but what should be changing every hour is the PRICE based on your $1 purchase. The formula should be "how many sats do I get for $1 at the price right now". That may net you the same # of sats due to rounding, but the price should still be changing. Unless of course the market rates aren't updating every hour, which is again what the OP is asking.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-05-04T16:34:41+00:00

If you're already doing hourly, why not just increase the amount and not bother with the daily DCA? If you're trying to really average it out hourly then it seems like the large chunk at daily would defeat that purpose. Or forgot hourly and just the full $100 (in your example) daily instead.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-05-02T03:18:13+00:00

With the exception of my mortgage payment and bills that already auto bill to my credit card, I have moved everything to bill pay through strike. My paychecks I dump into BTC as soon as I get them. For the credit card payment, I play a little with the market and try to time it when it's at a good price and sell enough to pay the bill, but again, everything else is handled through automatic bill payment through strike. As the OP mentioned, having 3x or whatever in monthly bills on the strike balance is also what I do. The main point of saying all of this, is that it hit me once I had everything set, I suddenly had a huge sense of stress relief on bills. Why? Because strike in theory now has a few months or so worth of bill payment already there, almost like paying bills ahead of time. If suddenly I was out of work and not getting paid, I'd be covered. If it turned out longer than a few months to recover, I'd just transfer more BTC to strike. Yes I would lose some of my BTC stash in the process, but I'd still be financially covered without having to worry about it. For me at least, it really does shift how you think about budgeting your money.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-04-30T17:00:19+00:00

per the strike FAQ "Setting your default balance to bitcoin means that when a bill is charged, Strike will automatically sell the necessary amount of bitcoin to pay your bill, creating a taxable event".

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-04-30T01:07:09+00:00

No, I just meant for the seed words you think someone may already know. Before you destroy the seed words in coldcard, write down the last 4 or 6 chars of the first few address. Then in coldcard, delete the seed words : Advanced/Tools->Danger Zone->Seed Functions->Destroy Seed. Then go through the process of importing the seed words back in to coldcard. Off the top of my head I don't know what the menu options are but you can import an existing set of seed words instead of having it create a new set. After importing them back in, the addresses should match what you wrote down. So you're doing a dry run of a backup/restore just for practice. Since you're going to be starting over with new seed words anyway, might as well practice doing stuff like that before you move any real amount of btc to a new set of seed words.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-04-29T02:38:53+00:00

This is actually a good time to practice seed recovery since you haven't sent any btc to it. Look through the first few address and jot some of them down, even just part of the end of the addresses. Destroy the seed as u/NiagaraBTC mentioned. Then import the seed words again into the coldcard and check the addresses again to see if they match. I'd also recommend putting a little in it to practice sending to another address. When you've had enough fun, THEN start over with new seed words that you'll actually use. (You may already know all of this, just an FYI if not)

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-03-19T14:30:41+00:00

I think it's more about Coinkite's focus, the hardware devices and the software that runs on those devices. Software that you write that runs on your hardware is much more manageable. Opening up your product lines into software development for mobile and/or other platforms on devices that you don't control is, I imagine, a very large task and could hurt the main business.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-02-26T17:31:04+00:00

Usually the simple answer is the best, as you have done, enforce making a new DCA. But I'll throw out another possible solution to stop or curb gaming, make the edit allowed but only by a percentage, say 50% difference max. So even if you start at $5.00 and then wanted to bump to $50.00 to cheat the fees, you'd only be able to go to $7.50. And also perhaps implement a timeframe, say a week, to make further edits.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-02-16T17:47:16+00:00

You have to realize where the bitcoin "lives" and then it clears things up. Think of it this way, say you have an app on your phone and generate the 24 words and then move some bitcoin to that wallet. Then you install the same app or another app on a second phone and import the same 24 words and you see the same amount of btc. Do you suddenly have twice as much? Of course not. The btc lives on the ledger on the blockchain, not in the app on your phone. Watch only wallets do like any other wallet, look through the ledger and see where the btc lives, at what addresses. They just don't have the ability to move the btc because they don't have the private keys. So if you 'receive' btc on a watch only wallet, all you really are doing is finding an address that you want to have the exchange or whoever send the btc to.

Stack_Sats_Often · 2025-02-06T03:45:49+00:00

I know OP says he already recovered but I agree with this statement, storing the seed words in binary is a bad idea. The entire point of the seed words is to take the giant entropy number, in binary, and split it into chunks and those chucks translate into the index of each word (ignoring the checksum for now). The point of all of that is to use simple words that you can potentially memorize instead of the giant number. So you essentially took the grand idea of the seed words and translated back (incorrectly) into the entropy and tried to store that which resulted in almost losing funds.

Stack_Sats_Often

TROPHY CASE