So you just invested a bunch of money into bitcoin, but you realized that you’re storing your huge bitcoin savings in unsecure web wallets.
When you store your coins in a web wallet, you’re giving a huge amount of trust to the company holding your coins.
If they get hacked, or decide that they want to run away with your coins, you’re done.
The only 100% secure way to store your bitcoin is to put them in cold storage, from a 100% fresh, secure operating system working offline.
This makes it impossible for a hacker to steal your private keys or your wallet.dat file.
The easiest (but still hard) way to do this is by installing the ubuntu OS on a brand new USB stick.
Then install an offline bitcoin wallet on the USB stick running ubuntu.
Next, you generate a bitcoin wallet address, and encrypt that with a very secure password (that you write down on paper).
You then need to test to make sure everything is setup correctly, and then send your coins to the public address generated from the offline wallet.
Then you’d want to backup your offline wallet.dat file on multiple USB drives, and then store your USB drives + written password in a safe or deposit box in your bank.
This setup would make it so the only possible way for someone to steal your coins is to steal your physical password and wallet.dat file (usb) from your safe.
If this process seems a little bit too complex, but you still want to secure your coins, check out http://securemybitcoins.com
This was a quick sideproject, so it’s currently only available in LA. If you’re in another location and want to help people secure their bitcoins, shoot me a message.
– J