I am just trying to figure out the best way to store bitcoin and a handful of altcoins for the longterm. I am thinking a paper wallet, but am not even sure what that is (is it the same as cold storage?) and am trying to figure out if I need one paper wallet per type of coin, or if there's something that will store all my coins together. Can someone also expand on the comments above regarding a USB stick? You store addresses on there? What do you mean by "addresses"? Thank you much!!
I can't speak for cryptowallets by my application is completely legit. You are completely right to have this worry and i recommend that anyone with these concerns run CryptoPapers fully offline.
We are still in Closed Beta but very soon we are releasing Open Beta to the Chrome App Store and GitHub.
Read about all of the advanced features that will be available here:
https://nxtforum.org/cryptopapers/
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Let me try to address your questions.
- Yes, paper wallets are considered cold storage
- USB sticks are a good way to store coins but they are vulnerable to EMPs unlike paper, which is a very small risk depending who you ask but worth mentioning.
- An Address is just the public facing side of your Private Key. All coins are set up so that you can't spend from an Address unless you can properly Sign a Transaction with the correct Private Key.
(For those of you that want to get technical you turn the Private Key into the Public Key using a Public Key Cryptographic Curve called secp256k1. The Public Key is then turned into an address by running it through SHA256 twice and then RIPEMD160 once, then converting it to Base58Check)