You could split between Gemini and Coinbase if you are dead-set against a hw wallet.

Or simply use a software wallet. Write down the seed phrases, then delete the software wallet. Recover it from seed phrases at your leisure.

Holy cow, you had hundreds of thousands of dollars of assets and couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to cash out before they lost value? You are on a different planet of financial management than most of us.

There was so much going on during the pandemic. My early employee stock and the rest of my portfolio was booming, and I'd just made my yearly TC on GME. The dogecoin gains were smaller and kind of an afterthought.

To top it off, the hard drive with the dogecoin was back at my mom's place or in storage, and it would have taken a lot of time to go back and find it.

Since it was easy to leave the computer where it was, I lazily made the incorrect decision to go long on DOGE as a gamble and as a further means of diversification. I incorrectly thought maybe it would sink then come back even higher. I didn't have to do anything to make that choice. It was very much a wrong move and missed opportunity, but everything was making me money back then, and I was making all sorts of other bets, so this one didn't seem too unreasonable.

I should have known it was a larger macro bubble, but this was my first rodeo. I didn't experience 2008 or 2000 with my own assets, and the COVID dip was my only taste of losses. My biggest regret in all of this was not selling all of my employee stock options last summer when it was near peak. I got stuck between two trading windows and thought that the losses would end of reverse.

I'm still in a good spot, but I could have "FAT FIRE"-d, fully retired (into working on my own thing), and bought half a dozen homes - a beach house, mountain getaway, Manhattan townhome... I thought about that a lot.

I did manage to purchase a historic penthouse in Atlanta with city views though, so I'm happy with that. And I've quit working to focus 100% on my own startup.

If anything, these experiences are good lessons and just give me more drive.

I think your degree of resilience in dealing with such setbacks is something to strive for, at the same time please be more careful in the future, the price of such setbacks tends to go up as you get older and even though you managed to get through this one in relatively good shape (if not financially, then at least mentally) the next time around you may not be so lucky.

What's this trend of telling others to please do something? I've seen it all over HN this year and it's so condescending.

It can be condescending but that’s not the only option. There’s been a lot of upset recently and older posters who remember 2000 and 2008 are trying to spare people the pain a lot of us either experienced personally or saw friends encounter. Based on his years of posting, I’m sure Jacques is in the latter category.

A friend of mine was in a similar position. I’m he knew he had a wallet holding about $300k of dodge coin. He just didn’t know if he had the key.

Long story short: he spend a big amount of time trying to recover the wallet key and failed. I’d understand someone not wanting to try something like that. It must be pretty demoralizing.

I have dogecoin wallets worth thousands from 2014 and such when we were joke mining before it had value - it isn’t that hard to fathom if you’ve operated in this space for a decade.