Topic: Wallets and Cold Storage. (Read 1834 times)

Then my suggestion would be to get a Ledger HW.1. It doesn't rely on Ledger the company to work. It's a USB stick, sort of. You can pick one up from Purse for $15, I paid in Bitcoin, and they shipped me mine for free. I have a review of one on my website. Check it out.

That's not a bad plan at all. I have three levels of storage, actually. The bulk of it is kept in a hardware wallet that I keep in a safe. I have a small amount in a mobile wallet that I use from day to day. I also have some in a mobile wallet that is locked with another hardware wallet. One thing I love about Bitcoin is that you can make it work for you. If you need some help, don't be afraid to ask.

That's correct. If you don't solely hold the private keys, you aren't the sole owner of the Bitcoin. I do honestly recommend that people start out on Coinbase or Circle just to reduce the number of variables and get used to buying, selling, and using Bitcoin. But for security and long term storage there are much better ways. If you're new, you could check out my tutorials at my website. It's fairly new and certainly not done, but you may find a place to start.

Coinbase does not give you a private key for address you use on it's site.  So if you leave it on the site you cannot use private key and import it into another wallet.  They do this for safety as a lot that use it are pretty new I think.

But with a lot of other options you have either seed words, or private key that you could use to import address into a different wallet.   I like ones where I have the private key.  I mostly use hardware wallets which keep it on it, and give seed word's to backup.  And paper wallets which are cold and not touched.

Yes, you can purchase coins on Coinbase and send them to another wallet. They don't keep your coins forever. You don't have to worry about anything. I made large purchases on coinbase and transfer my coins over to my wallet on my computer.
*As stated, you shouldn't keep your coins on an exchange, no matter which one for a long time for security issues. I always feel safer holding my coins, my personal opinion.

Wait.. So if I am reading this correctly, if I exchange cash for bitcoin through coin base it has to stay in coinbase? I couldn't send the coins to another wallet that I have?

Coinbase is very safe, they even have insurance that should protect investment if big site hack (it does not protect individual account's though if lost do to you).  So it has that with Mt Gox never had.

Wait.. So if I am reading this correctly, if I exchange cash for bitcoin through coin base it has to stay in coinbase? I couldn't send the coins to another wallet that I have?

Coinbase is very safe, they even have insurance that should protect investment if big site hack (it does not protect individual account's though if lost do to you).  So it has that with Mt Gox never had.

Only problem with it is you have 0 control outside of coinbase.  You won't get a paper wallet or private key you can enter into a different wallet and use your holdings.  Your stuck there if there is any problems.

How safe is it to store bitcoins on a place like coinbase? I know mt gox went down is it likely something like that could happen to other exchanges?

Your talking in theatricals.  It is kinda non-sense your computer has chips.. your printer has chips.. are they all set with backdoor?   You can go on and on with it.... at end of day there has not been a hardware wallet with a backdoor (to my knowledge).  Can you point to so meting that shows a modern hardware wallet with a security flaw this big?   Do you have anything hard proof not theoretical?  And which hardware wallets have you used?

And I'm not saying paper does not have a place if your planning on leaving it cold for long period of time and not using it, if done right paper is great.  I just don't like to use you have to import into wallet.  On hardware I like that if you need use it signs transactions on the device huge pro if you need to access it.  But if you are putting it away for the next year or so paper wallet is great for you.

That is some weird order, anyway, good way now. Owning actual bitcoins is essential for learning about bitcoins and more.

Actually you are the one who needs to do more research. Yes you are right the software that runs on it is mostly open source (no hardware wallet released so far is actually 100% open source, some have 99% of the code open source like the trezor but most don't have any part of the hardware open sourced, none of the ones you have linked are 100% code and hardware open source), however there are still many other worries. One thing that scares me a lot is that trezor hard an onboard RNG chip that is not open source and was completely designed and manufactured by a third party vendor, however it doesn't use this chip exclusively it combines it with random data from your PC so unless both are colluding you are safe. First of all unless you actually build the software from source and load it onto the device yourself how can you know what is running on it. How do you know that the device hasn't got some extra code that generates non random seed words, or even more hard to detect - non random R values, similar to the bug in blockchain.info before, or even code that transmits the seed words hidden in inside the tx data allowing the attacker to retrieve them from the blockchain after you push a tx. Even if you do load the code yourself it is still possible that some chip on the device is the thing that is backdoored and able to execute these kinds of attacks, this is called "hardware hacking". This is near impossible to detect. The US military has invested billions into trying to solve this problem and are able to detect backdoored chips by destructive testing by means that are not yet public however we do know that the chip is useless afterwards, so when they need to source chips from China or such they buy lots of chips and destroy 80% of them and if they find no backdoors they decide the remaining 20% are safe enough and those are the ones that end up in black hawk helicopters and other important things. So tl;dr; It is really hard to be sure your hardware wallet isn't backdoored. Unless you build it from bare silicon yourself there is trust involved.

After studying bitcoin for the past few months and collecting Lealana and Casascius coins I'm ready to buy some actual bitcoins. I've been looking into exchanges and made a thread about it.