I have to mostly agree with that point of view, but if you want to store serious about of BTC and you're "non-technical" you should hire someone technical to do it. If the amount is within acceptable losses for you, then sure. Coinbase as a convenient vault storage sound better than other online wallets.
I don't think they can beat a 100% offline computer. One that has never touched the internet ever and has a secure backup copy somewhere within an encrypted usb key and or printed encrypted paper in a bank safety box. But then other than that, Coinbase sound good enough for most users.
The idea of hiring someone to setup your BTC holdings is horrible. I don't care how much trust you have for a "non-technical" user do not hire someone to set up your private key and cold storage. You want it to be you eyes only or it defeats the whole reason of being cold.
I'm not saying it's perfect for all users mainly technical and safe ones. But for someone who does not know how to use bitcoin properly coinbase forces you to not have a private key.... which is good if a user does not know what they are doing.
I don't know, I just wouldn't trust an online wallet with more than 1 BTC. Any online wallet out there. And if you have to trust online wallets, I would choose 3 different ones and put 0.33 BTCs in each one of them, just to spread the risk.
About someone securing your coins, yes this is terrible if it's not a person that you absolutely trust. Your brother, mother, father. If you don't know how to secure your bitcoins by yourself, you shouldn't own any.
Also, to secure your coins is not that hard in my opinion. Setting up a wallet for Ethereum in the command line window, that was hard. Backing up the seed of your Electrum wallet by following simple instructions is not hard at all.
Thats what i'm saying. I'm not saying someone should hold your coins for you, i'm saying you should have someone teach you to do it. Show you how to set it up. Its not that complicated. There should be no risk with having someone show you how to set it up unless you're completely clueless and somehow manage to hand over your BTC. Setting up an offline wallet isint that hard.
And for Coinbase, i think its the least worse Online wallet. I wouldn't store significant amount of money there. A few BTC at most, in the vault, supposedly insured should do, however.
That would make more sense on teaching how to do it. With "have to mostly agree with that point of view, but if you want to store serious about of BTC and you're "non-technical" you should hire someone technical to do it." just sounded like pay for someone to do it not teach, so I could have read it wrong I guess.
But make sure the person teaching you is honest and you trust them. Also DO NOT let them plug anything even just a thumb drive into your computer. And watch them the whole time on computer.
I guess that if a person actually came to your home and set up the software could be somehow installing everything with a privkey he already own, i guess this is some kind of thing you should keep in mind in the BTC world.
I guess we should say hire someone to hold your hand through the process of learning and setting it up, maybe online. You're not really physically storing wealth in a container, so there's no physical setup of a vault to do.
Its not like there's much that need to be done physically anyways. You just install the software on a offline computer, then learn how to sign transactions on the offline computer. If a very small step up from normal bitcoin usage.
