#cold storage wallets

Securing Your Bitcoins

By John Light, letstalkbitcoin.com

Throughout my time researching and participating in the cryptocurrency economy, I have seen a lot of hacks and a lot of fraud. Though the old saying “a fool and his money are easily parted” could apply here, I’d like to think that it’s not all the end users’ fault. It is also about the tools that are available, and how easy it is for people to use them. Though cryptocurrency is a new technology, there are a growing number of options for you to secure your bitcoins:

Offline “Cold Storage” Wallets

The gold standard in cryptocurrency security, cold storage is the process of keeping private keys offline to make them unreachable to hackers via the internet (private keys allow cryptocurrency to be spent). The solution for this that I recommend to clients is the Bitcoin Armory Wallet – to me, nothing else comes close in terms of features, usability, and support from the development team. They have an excellent step-by-step guide on their website to help you set up the wallet and transfer your investment safely offline. You will need two computers for this, one which is kept permanently disconnected from the internet to keep the private keys safe, and one to keep online for broadcasting signed transactions to the network. The offline machine can be a cheap netbook or Raspberry Pi setup (hint: going the Raspberry Pi route will take some patience and/or technical skills). After creating encrypted wallet backups on multiple forms of media (CD, USB drive, and paper), add full disk encryption to the offline computer. I recommend full disk encryption for your online computer as well.