Topic: Bitcoin savings fund for children or grandchildren? - page 2. (Read 3459 times)

In a bitcoin only world, you would have 1/21000000th of the money. The real wealth could be much higher. It is not necessary that the number of coins multiplied by its value represents the real wealth. Anyway, give your toddler a 1 BTC coin and tell him to buy a car when he grows up.

You could look at it as buying a lottery ticket.

A shot at owning 1/21000000th of the wealth of the world for the cost of dinner and a movie.

Personally, I'm a long-term type of guy.

You could always laminate the paper, which would make it considerably more durable.  That would essentially protect it from general degradation and water.  It would obviously still be vulnerable to certain things (ie. theft, fire) but so would a coin.

Since I believe that there is a small chance of bitcoin becoming very very valuable, and a large chance of it becoming worthless, I would buy a small amount of coins, and put the rest of your savings for your children/grandchildren into other things (gold, real estate (if you are rich), stocks ..).
That way, if bitcoin makes it, it will provide your offspring with a good amount of wealth, but in the likely scenario that something goes wrong, the loss will be minimal, and they will still have the other things.

No, my own testing shows that it's much better than plain paper, but still destroyable by fire or acid. I'd say, on par with quality laminated paper that's printed with good ink and never exposed to sun, attached to a silver plate so can't be bent or scratched. It should be able to stay put for 100 years easily.

Does any experiment show that private key printed on Casascius coin is durable for decades or centuries? How about extreme conditions, e.g. high/low temperature, high/low humidity, soaking in water/organic solvent, fire?

Surprised people discuss paper option at length but ignore your casascius suggestion. There's a thousand ways your paper key will get lost forever (or stolen if you put it in too many locations); physical coin on the other hand can only be lost to thief or extreme fire, not humidity, age, sunlight, insects, bad ink, bad paper, etc. I just use some 25 btc coins for this purpose stored in various places for the future use.

Bitcoin has been around for 4 years, less than that in a usable software form.  It would be interesting to load up a wallet with bitcoins and store it for maybe, 5 years, before retrieval.  It's long enough to be a really long time in terms of bitcoin, but also short enough that you'll avoid media degredation worries or simply forgetting about the whole thing.

In addition to my previous post, if you were serious about storing bitcoins for children or grand children it would be well worth storing a couple of DVD drives with the discs.  In a decade or two you may have difficulty finding a working drive even if your media is all fine.  A USB DVD drive isn't a bad idea as USB has been around for a very long time.  I had a USB enabled PC in 1997, so it's fairly likely USB will be known and maybe even used in some form in a decade or two from now.  Heck, it's still possible to buy new motherboards with serial and parallel ports, technology that dates back to the 1970s.

What would a reasonable time frame for a project like this be in your opinon ? Still 5 years would be interesting..

I would store the wallet with instructions on how to use it on a variety of media.  Paper, CDR, and DVDR.  Anything using flash memory is guaranteed to lose data within about 10 years.  The smaller the cells and higher density of data, the faster the data loss.

Hexadecimal format on acid free paper printed with a laser printer.  Store in multiple locations.  Same with CDR/DVDR.  Buy several different brands and types of discs (organic dye medium).  Beware of OEMs making many different brands.  You may buy 5 brands thinking they're different when really they're identical.  A couple of discs may fail but the chances of all failing, across all types in all locations is very slim.  My first CDRs burned on Kodak gold discs are still readable more than 15 years later.

Finding a place to store the wallet securely and making sure that the recipients find it will be your greater problems.

The greatest problems: people losing interest in bitcoin because something better comes along.  In the 20 year period money is transfered to the new system.  The left over bitcoins are worthless as there's no one left to trade them with.  A change in hashing protocol rendering your bitcoins worthless is also a big risk.  Hashing algorithms come and go as vulnerabilities are found.  MD5 was once considered very good for example.

Play with the idea and maybe set aside some bitcoins as a fun experiment, but I wouldn't invest serious amounts of money.

I would like to revisit this issue.

I have allocated a certain sum that if lost completely is a loss that will not stop me from sleeping at night.

Thus, the idea is to convert this sum into bitcoins. I understand that I can generate a private key and corresponding bitcoin address on an air gapped computer. Then I thought it would be a great idea to  ingrave the private key to a metal plate, a ring or something similar, perhaps along with some short instructions. Ie. "BTC redeemable, privkey: 5Kb8kLf9zgWQnogidDA76MzPL6TsZZY36hWXMssSzNydYXYB9KF". I've also seen that a minikey (eg. SzavMBLoXU6kDrqtUVmffv) can be used. But I feel that the longer Wallet import format works better, as I for some reason picture it would be safer.

By the end of the day, if this project fail, then so be it - and I made a shot and lost. No regrets.

Is there any 'guarantee' (in the sense we can talk about it), that as long as bitcoin exist the Wallet import format will always be supported? Perhaps some new format will come in the future, but will there still be some backwards compability?

If we look at a time fram of say 20 years, this can make for a very interesting story when the coins are finally redeemed. Is it possible, what would the value increase (or decrease) be, and on what device and which software program would it be redeemed. Also, I feel that inprinting it on a metal piece would make for better durability.  It could be ingraved on something similar to this:



I am sure no other family members have the slightest clue about what I am on about, but I'm willing to try, and I think it is a great idea. What do you think, and is there something you'd like to add apart from what's already said ?

furthermore, when you hit enter after interpreting and typing the 144 printed letters into Armory and it says "error" it doesn't tell you which of the 144 letters was wrong.  so you have to keep guessing which one.  could take you a lifetime...

writing out regular private keys would be worse b/c of the inclusion of #'s and caps.  the diff btwn 1's and l's is an example.

this is interesting.  a while ago i tried handwriting the Armory root key and chain codes onto a piece of paper b/c i was paranoid about using my printer.  and his seeds only consists of letters, no numbers, and no caps.  turns out, my printing was so bad i couldn't reliably tell the difference btwn a "d" and an "a" or an "h" and an "n" and sometimes an "i" or an "l" or a "w" and a "u".  i was shocked at hard that simple task was.  bottom line; it you handwrite out the key, test it at least 3x to make sure you can access the pub key.

1.  your descendants will probably not be frequenting this forum like you to get the notice of a protocol change.
2.  they probably won't have your technical skills to do the tx.
3.  gold is being brought up from the depths of the ocean at the fastest pace ever yet its not tanking the gold price.
4.  most if not all of the big addresses are not lost coins. 
5.  the whole concept is just a "theory" that by my estimation is totally unfounded.

I would grab a piece of stainless steel/silver/gold and engrave the keys on that. It'll be still there 500 years later! (even more if gold is used)

I estimate chances for any "expiration algorithm" to become part of the bitcoin protocol are very low. However, cracking of old and seemingly unused wallets that have not been updated with better encryption algorithms will become a reality once computational power becomes cheap and plentiful enough. 20 years from now, Y not? (thats at least what I read)

SO investing in Bitcoin holds alot of potential, but is still pretty risky and putting your childrens education on the line in this gamble seems not worth it. YOu may wanna consider opting for other investments, like bonds, fonds with a broad and low risk portfolio or real estate.

In no case should you leave those coins unattended!

Best of luck,
Spekulatius

proudhon gave me a great idea which i adapted;  print the paper wallet using Armory, cut it into a smaller piece, folded it once, wrap it in a piece of construction paper so it can't be seen and then laminate both sides.  i'm sure it protects somewhat from oxidative damage to the print and it can be stuffed in a safe deposit box if desired.

well thank gaud then.

I'm pretty sure its dead. I can't imagine getting everyone to agree on how to do it. It could be a feature of another altcoin someday though.