A better way to store your coins is to to get a HD hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano S, or KeepKey. These paper wallets are too vulnerable to destruction. With an HD wallet you get a 24 word seed (see BIP39) and if anything ever happens to the wallet you just buy a new one and restore from the see. To protect your seed you can carve the words into a block of brass which has a high enough melting point that it should survive a house fire. You can use something like a Bantam Milling machine if you don't want to do it by hand.
For smaller amounts of money there is also OpenDime. They don't provide a back-up mechanism though so if the hardware goes your money is lost forever.
> To protect your seed you can carve the words into a block of brass which has a high enough melting point that it should survive a house fire. You can use something like a Bantam Milling machine if you don't want to do it by hand.
And people say that Bitcoin isn't user-friendly for beginners.
> With an HD wallet you get a 24 word seed (see BIP39) and if anything ever happens to the wallet you just buy a new one and restore from the seed.
You can do exactly the same with paper wallets, for what it's worth. Think of the paper wallet as you hardware wallet's backup. Store it securely in 2 places and you're ok.
That's fine for storing, the problem is that you need the key to sign any tx, so if you just have the paper wallet you need to import it to a computer or mobile device each time you need to do it while if you have an hw device the key never leaves it
It's pretty old-world advice to not leave all of your money "in one basket".
If you're going to store large amounts of BTC or any other digital store of value, why would you do it on one device unless you trust it absolutely?
The currency is supposed to be trustless, ultimately. Should you really put all of your trust into one device, manufactured in bulk outside of your purview? Especially when it may (in some cases, but sadly not mine) contain hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions!
I tend to store in a few mediums (including a low-capacity SD card), in places I know, with backup seeds in other inconspicuous locations. It's not high tech, necessarily.
That said, I don't do much regular trading, so I don't need to plug my [hardware wallet] in and pipe funds around often. If I want to trade, I tend to wait until I can buy more and in the interim watch the goings on.
I really think that stuff is neat tech, but not useful unless you want to day trade, or use cryptocurrencies for regular purchases.
I wouldn't trust my crypto savings to any kind of flash memory device especially MicroSD cards those things, are super unreliable for long term storage. I don't trade at all buy and hold only.
Or you just encrypt it properly and with a secure password you have memorized, and upload it to a cloud server which you trust will not disappear all of a sudden and upload it there. Then, you decrypt it every know and then to check the files integrity and that you still remember the hash. If you ever believe the account might have been hacked, you just move the coins to another wallet just-to-be-safe.
Another alternative (if you are not good at remembering passwords) is to give a piece of paper to a family member or good friend with the key and tell them to store it safely. This is no different then giving them a spare key or give them authorization to your bank account/deposit
There are also tools that allow to take your seed and split it in m subgroups so that you need at least n out of m to rebuild it. So instead of giving password to a single family member (or two relatives, half and half) you can give it to more people and you can still recreate it even if some lose it
>To protect your seed you can carve the words into a block of brass which has a high enough melting point that it should survive a house fire. You can use something like a Bantam Milling machine if you don't want to do it by hand.
Hah. Recently I went searching for old wallets of mine. Found .5 BTC in Blockchain and .1 in each of 3 Coinbase accounts. At the time I had created each those the BTC they contained was all worth less than a dollar. It was neat to find about $2k "in the couch", but also infuriating that I couldn't find more. I also have a locked wallet with 2.5BTC that I can't unlock (although I have John the Ripper plugging away at it) again which was worth nearly nothing at the time I made it.
So the short answer is, there is practically no quantity of Bitcoin too small to be worth properly securing it. If it's enough to be transactable (not dust) then for the love of god secure it and with luck your kids will be truly thankful that you did.
Easy enough to install on Linux there are plenty of guides. Just a few commands to grab the source and tools to build it and then compile the binaries.
Once you have that, there's a tool (python script I think) to extract the hash from the wallet.dat. Then you run it against that.
The hardest and most important part is seeding a proper word list for it to work off of. The default dictionary probably isn't going to crack it.
A hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano S only costs $50 so I would recommend that for people with as little as a fe hundred bucks.
How you choose to protect your back-up seed really depends on the amount of value you are protecting. Writing it on paper and storing it in a fire proof safe or safe deposit box might be good enough.
I thought it would make a cool movie device if you encrypt your paper wallet in a 2-of-3 method. Then store 2 parts in different safety deposit boxes in different countries and carry the 3rd on you. The movie then revolves about getting your cash while on the run from several governments.
One neat thing about multisig keys physically spread is that it's extremely more difficult to coerce someone to make a payment. If an attacker knows you have a ton of money locked up behind a key you have memorized, they can kidnap and torture you until you give them the key. If the money is locked behind multiple keys physically spread and you're known to be the paranoid sort to do that, then it becomes a lot more logistically challenging and may deter kidnappers: some of the locations could have physical security (ie. it's in a bank safe deposit box that the bank only allows the owner alone to physically access), there's more chances for the victim to get away, the attackers can't know ahead of time if the victim is leading them on a wild goose chase to incorrect locations, etc.
This appeals to me in a way that's hard to articulate. It's the perfect combination of "this will never happen" and "well now, let's not be too hasty with our assumptions..."
It makes me think of XKCD 538 and its alt-text (https://xkcd.com/538/ -- "Actual actual reality: nobody cares about his secrets"). The part that alt-text didn't foresee was that cryptocurrency would become a thing and that many people would store tons of value in it.
I think anyone that got into Bitcoin early or has otherwise made it big in the cryptocurrency scene ought to seriously investigate setting up their funds in a way that they can't be quickly coerced into transferring it.
>some of the locations could have physical security (ie. it's in a bank safe deposit box that the bank only allows the owner alone to physically access)
This remind me of stories of people on localbitcoins doing exchange at a local bank because physical security is good for decentralised internet money.
There is a critical bug in this approach that the attacker may not be aware of the use of multisig keys beforehand and have a good incentive to kill the victim.
That chain of thought of wanting to make it easy to irreversibly liquidate your assets fast for a kidnapper leads to strange places.
Make sure to be rich. If you don't own cryptocurrency, make sure to buy some and convert most of your wealth to it so you can irreversibly send most of your wealth away to give in to an attacker. Make sure the keys to spend it all immediately are physically present with you and easy to access when you're kidnapped. Hope the kidnappers don't hold out for more.
If an individual is known to have done that, or the above steps are commonly followed, then kidnapping-for-ransom becomes a more common and more rational thing to do by desperate people. Doing the opposite, having people plan ahead to make it harder to please a kidnapper, makes the kidnapping-for-ransom attack less common and less rational to do. My argument is more about making it not happen to begin than making a kidnapping go pleasantly for the victim.
Yep, it's just 16 5-digit numbers or 43 letters. Totally doable with some dedication. My last hard password contained 24 characters, it's 144 bit and I spent may be a hour to memorize it.
Does private key remains the same after transaction? I thought that every transaction moves coins into a new address. If that's the case, then memorizing key each time will become cumbersome very fast.
Why so much security focus on a non-internet connected PC, but so little focus on needing a non-internet connected (ever) printer?
The printer is potentially an easier attack vector, and you've got to pass the funds into an electronic wallet prior to spending, presumably on your PC or phone, whilst an internet connection is enabled.
Seems writing the wallet info down with a pen, then doing your best to ensure security when you have to use the wallet (e.g. live CD) is a better method?
I presume these paper wallets, like paper cash, are subjected to possible erosion, water damage, or whatever happens during storage. Except with paper cash, you have some party, the government, willing to exchange it for new ones. What are the benefits of paper wallets over a hardware wallet or storing it online?
Also, is it me or are people more paranoid with their Bitcoins than others with their USDs?
>Also, is it me or are people more paranoid with their Bitcoins than others with their USDs?
The basic deal of bitcoin is that it's harder for people to tell you what you can and can't do with it, but it's also harder for them to help you if you shoot yourself in the foot with that freedom.
A lot of the peanut gallery is scared away by notions like "if you lose your key, there's no one you can yell at down a phone or sue to get your money back, so you'll just have to be an adult and plan carefully". What remains is people who are a bit more systematic and thorough with respect to their finances.
With USD you may as well just put it in the bank - if the banking system fails your paper money probably won't be worth anything anyway. Bitcoin on the other hand could easily outlive any of the companies that will hold it for you.
>What are the benefits of paper wallets over a hardware wallet or storing it online?
If you only have bitcoin on a single hardware wallet, then if that hardware wallet fails to work one day, then you're boned. Paper wallets are easy to maintain and visually verify the integrity of (they're just ink on paper). Definitely recommend people using them keep multiple copies in different locations though.
By online:
* if you meant in a computer connected to the internet, then if your computer gets malware then it could steal your bitcoin.
* if you meant in an online exchange, then you have the above issue (malware could steal your login info) combined with the issue that the exchange could go offline / lose your money / run away with your money. (See MtGox, btc-e, etc.)
>Also, is it me or are people more paranoid with their Bitcoins than others with their USDs?
If money is stolen from your bank account, then the bank will reverse the transaction. Bitcoin transactions can't be reversed like that, so their security is solely in the user's hands.
>If you only have bitcoin on a single hardware wallet, then if that hardware wallet fails to work one day, then you're boned.
By "only have bitcoin on a single hardware wallet", I meant the case that the user did not back up their seed phrase (such as to a piece of paper). I was trying to hint that the best setup would be multiple paper wallet backups (or the seed phrase written onto multiple papers; I'm not sure it's useful to call that something other than a paper wallet) combined with a hardware wallet for actually making transactions.
Those bitcoin banks have poor reps for security and liability. If a USD bank gets robbed you're insured. Also the USD bank can't invest your money without your knowledge. Well, at least not everything in high risk stuff.
I bought some water proof inkjet paper for my paper wallets. I did a few test runs under the kitchen sink. I don't know how this paper works but it's pretty awesome.
Just create a file and put in in your google drive and don't lose access to that. Encrypt it as long as you are sure you will be able to decrypt it. I bet you that Google don't steal your bitcoins.
For smaller amounts of money there is also OpenDime. They don't provide a back-up mechanism though so if the hardware goes your money is lost forever.