Topic: How to safely store big amounts of BTC? - page 11. (Read 12101 times)

Having a deeper understanding to what you are dealing with can give you much better anticipations, if you do  use single wallet but you have a good anticipation to what possibilities to happen, you can do that without any worries about your assets.

Can you explain a little bit more how you lost all your BTC? Because only writing this makes me think you lost your coins from hot wallets that have been hijacked?

if in my opinion, bro.
if we have a large amount of BTC, don't keep it in one wallet. if you can save it in 3/4 of a wallet because from the experience I got at the beginning of 2018 I lost 63 BTC. because I keep it in one wallet

Many risks to avoid the number of hackers. To anticipate, you can share your assets. If my advice is, I will divide it into several coins, for example eth. You can use MEW. Save multiple wallets on e-mail, PC or other devices.

You have only 10 to 15 btc and there are people who are storing 100 btc on a single wallet. You do not need to make things complicated. More the wallets, more the private keys and it will make every thing confusing. Just keep a single hardware wallet and keep the private keys in two different places and that will be enough.

1. Never put large amounts in an online wallet or on an exchange. Those are frequently hacked or stolen. That is a very common way people lose huge amounts of BTC.

2. A local online wallet is great, but is only as great as the security on your PC.  If your computer is at home, is connected through a modern router, and you use mostly web based or Steam bought applications than your chance of being hacked is somewhere between zero and very remote. Multi-signature wallets can mitigate a lot of this by requiring that multiple devices sign the transaction. That means if your PC gets hacked, it can't spend money unless your phone or other device has also been hacked. Always be sure to encrypt local wallets, and make sure you have a good quality anti-virus program installed.

3. Hardware wallets are the most secure, but there is an added cost that may exceed the value they are providing. If, for example, someone keeps $10k in a (local) online wallet but has a .5% chance of being hacked, then the cost of the hardware wallet is greater than the amount they would expect to lose on average. At that point, a decision needs to be made whether it is better to self insure or to pay to buy that extra insurance.

4. An offline PC is also very secure, but there is always the risk it might be compromised locally and generating the transaction to spend money requires extra work to copy it off the offline storage.

5. Paper wallets are very insecure, since anyone who gets access to it can spend the money without passwords or any multi-factor authentication. I don't think people fully appreciate the risk they take when they put wallet words in obvious places; homes are robbed regularly, and crooks nowadays are savvy. I believe you're safer putting wallet words in an online location that is known to be highly secured, i.e. Google products, than in a desk drawer where even a family member who knows you are into crypto could drain your wallet.

the higher the number of time the seeds are written down and kept in multiple places, the greater the chance of losing the coin to third party. Holding such huge amount of money is like holding something that when you lose it you are going to lose your life. I have seen people keeping valuable assets in banks and other third-party. putting hardware wallet that contain such amount of money in bank is not a bad idea. Even if the owner died, I am sure his/her family will still have opportunity to make use of the asset. my own opinion though.

I confimed this alot !
My friend had pas incident when he put massive amount of bits on online wallet and suddenly, the fund was moving.
He forgot to unauthorised the website before try to log out !

You can split 15 btc into 3 different hardware wallet, and in this case, I will choose Ledger S Nano or Ledger X Nano. Then for each wallet, you can send 4 btc, and you still have 3 btc left. And then you use the other wallet like Mycelium to save 2 btc and send 1 btc in the exchanges for trading, but that is only if you want to trade. But if it's not, you can save it in Mycelium and hold it for a long time.

For Mycelium wallet, you can buy 1 new mobile phone but don't insert any card to that phone and don't connect to the internet if you don't want to access the Mycelium. Remember to save all of the private keys for each wallet so if you lose one wallet or hardware wallet, and you can restore it into another hardware.

Personally, I think it is not wise to divide 24 seed words on so many small pieces, after some time it is very easy to forget correct order of such backup. If you want extra security just divide seed in two parts, keep one backup (12+12 words) at your place, and other in some other place. More backup on one hand means greater security, but it is also a double-edged sword - which means more chances to someone accidentally or intentionally finds your backup.


I think that's the expression constantly is exaggerated, in 3 years Ledger is have only 4 firmware update, and the vast majority of problems occurred in people who have used or still use Windows 7, this OS in not supported by Ledger, but it is still supported by Trezor. It is true that such devices can fail, but because of that we have backup (seed words), which can be used in many other wallets (mobile,desktop) for recovery.

I am not to fond of hardware wallets for long-term storage, because they constantly need firmware upgrades and some of these upgrades can be tricky, like we saw with Ledger a while ago.     

I like to store large amounts on laminated Paper wallets and I make sure I make several copies and store them in different locations. I bought a cheap computer and printer and I printed 1000s of paper wallets and then destroyed the equipment, so nobody would ever be able to recover anything from those devices. 

Don't keep all eggs in one basket so divide your coins in multiple wallets. This is the way how you can diminish the risk. Also, use hardware wallets they are still the most secure but it would be also good to combine them with offline wallets. And store your access data somwhere at really safe place where no one else could have the access.

If you have 15 bitcoin righr now and you want to seperate to different kinds of wallet you can also use mobile wallet but make sure it is very secure like using 2FA to your gmal account and also set notification to your mobile phone for accessing your wallet only.

That is huge amount of bitcoin and you will need to choose best wallet for every 5 bitcoin keep to not stole by the other people or by the hacker.

don't put everything on a hardware wallet. you should never put all your eggs in one basket. last i checked, ledger and keepkey (not sure about trezor) have partially closed source firmware. plus, i'm still of the opinion that the attack surface of hardware wallets is relatively unknown/untested.

i would generate multiple offline wallets (bitcoin core is best) so not all my coins are kept in one place, encrypt them, and store them (keeping multiple copies of each) on general purpose hardware like generic USB sticks.

that's the other thing i hate about hardware wallets.....they scream "i have crypto, steal me!"

I think it's better to use one hardware wallet because it's more convenient and less hassle, spreading it out on different wallet will just confuse you. Just make sure to keep the private key and seed phrase in a paper wallet and also engrave it in a metal and keep it in a vault so that incase of fire you will still have a way to access your wallet.

If i were you used your btc wisely make at least 4 or 5 wallets for security purposes, and some of it use it to earn more by doing some trading to increase your profit, or used your BTC in some legal investment or create or start your own business, used it to gain more, for your future.

Some comments above has been enough to give you understanding how to store your bitcoin and I don't think about security you will do it. Each person has ability to make sure that the security thing is an important thing when they are store the assets. But seems like there are  other people who still ignore these way and he believes that he is the only person who knows to access the his wallet. Whilst the system is not perpect, there are still a person who will try to broke your security and make your assets stolen. So, I'll just give a little suggestion, if you know your asset is everything for you then you should know everything about the hardware wallet, find ins and out about the hardware wallet and make sure you have done everything in detail to make your wallet safe. Also, if you have a huge amount of bitcoin don't try to store your bitcoin on exchange wallet, it's really not safe.

Use a wallet that has devices, it will make yourself able to safeguard assets more safely.
Avoiding networks can make our assets avoid crime. Believe that when we store assets in large quantities we must make special treatment.
Avoid all access that is easy to guess so we will feel calm and comfortable.

Store in your personal wallet. And keep your private key in a secret folder so no one knows it. For safer you can save in Wallet ledger. Because the hardware wallet is very secure.

there is not that much issue with trusting hardware wallets since most of their firmware is already open source but there still is room for concern. i personally will never use hardware wallets because i believe people shouldn't pay for a bitcoin wallet since they can make a secure one themselves if they put enough time into it. and if you have a lot of money at stake you should spend time learning how to do it anyways.