I know I should know how too... but how do I use moneroaddress.org offline. Is there someway to download it onto a USB and stick it onto a computer that's offline?
Well I think the easiest way would be just to go to moneroaddress.org, to unplug the internet connection and to be sure that computer does not connect by itself to any other wifi, to click the create wallet button, to print the page with mnemonic seed, public address, spend key, view key and such, delete browser history and data, close the browser and restart the whole computer.
I am quite paranoid, so I boot my machine from Ubuntu DVD which cannot contain any malware, hopefully, and do the rest like described above. I also use a very simple printer which has no wifi and has just a very little memory to store any data. So I use very cheap printer. Which is great.
Good method. Slightly better would be a custom DVD with just a trusted OS and the moneroaddress page. You would not need to connect to the internet at all.
So you can take any old blank DVD laying around and burn these programs on there? Or maybe a flash drive? What if the computer has been connected to the internet for a long time?
Also how would you go about monitoring your wallet and seeing what your account balance is, spend it, etc.?
Flash drive is writable, so in theory malware could infiltrate and maliciously store your wallet there. Best is to create the wallet on hardware with no persistent storage at all, but that is difficult to achieve in practice since there is flash firmware in most hardware.
In practice creating a USB stick with OS and the wallet generator, then booting on an offline system is probably good enough. For extra paranoia, completely wipe the stick before plugging it back into an online system for reuse. A burned DVD would be slightly better.
For monitoring payments to the wallet you can use a view key wallet. The goal of this method overall would be for long-term storage, so it would be unspendable. To (eventually) spend you would generally restore the wallet to an online system (then no longer consider the wallet suitable for long term storage). We're working on methods to sign transactions offline, but its not really usable yet.
