Bitcoin Forum

Excellent tutorial for Bitcoin cold storage using Electrum wallet for SERIOUS bitcoiners:

http://darknetmarkets.com/bitcoin-cold-storage-electrum/

I will admit I find a good hardware wallet and safe storage of the seed a substitute for cold storage, easy but secure access with the additional security of the HW wallet and the paper cold storage of the wallet's seed.

Problems with this tutorial:
1) It is not free, if you want to pay $200 for a laptop on Amazon why not just buy a Trezor!
2) It uses Window!
3) With Electrum you don't need to save the wallet.dat on multiple Flash drives. You can just save the seed (best if encrypted seed).
4) Step Six sounds stupid to me. As long as there are live linuxes without persistence there is absolutely no need for using: Windows 7, Truecrypt, File Eraser.

Additional goof: the article keeps saying "your bitcoins are hanging in the blockchsin", "Bitcoins never touch your wallet". These are not correct statements.

There is no problems with using Windows for storing large amount of Bitcoins. The most common ways that a windows installation gets a virus is through the installation or opening of an untrustable software. Definitely would be safer using linux if you are using it as your daily driver as well.

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It isn't a tutorial that I can recommend to follow. The tutorial omits the most important part of having a cold storage, the spending. The user can purchase a raspberry pi for a cheap price, install Electrum and raspbian and run Electrum in it. Use the raspberry pi to sign the transaction that the user wants to initiate.

Not so related but the author is a known scammer. http://darknetmarkets.com/author/dnmadmin/
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=713699.0

What? The? Fuck? They suggest TrueCrypt? True - the canary is screaming - crypt?

This(!) is the official truecrypt page -> http://truecrypt.sourceforge.net/ (no SSL avalable)
This(!) is the Windows 7 critical vuln found in TrueCrypt "recently" (over 1 year before the guide was written) -> https://bugs.chromium.org/p/project-zero/issues/detail?id=538&redir=1
Their source for TrueCrypt has not even a sha256sum and the file is not found when I try to connect over SSL. -> https://hotbitcoins.com/software/Truecrypt7.1a.exe (https://hotbitcoins.com/software/Truecrypt7.1a.exe)

Step two: "create an electrum wallet on an air-gapped Windows 7 laptop", no info, nothing on how to set this up.

Step six: "wipe disk" or "destroy disk" is bullshit. Either you have a proper air-gapped system in which case you dont need this or you dont.

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Bonus:

#1 There is no reason to suggest Windows here, Linux (tested) or MacOS (untested) would work just as well and does not need you do download an extra "file shredder" (again unofficial, bad source)
#2 This is no actual guide or tutorial, its at best an idea

This guy is a famous bitcoin thief who offered fake mixing services and stole the coins iirc

He is the last person anyone should trust regarding "safe bitcoin storage"  lol.....

Why should people go places in difficulty and having to create cold storage not so easily (your guide doesn't look that easy to me, downloading truecrypt and file shredder, as not all persons know how to use truecrypt) when they can just buy a hardware wallet like Ledger HW.1 which cost the same as 3 or 4 USB nowadays which are also needed in your guide. Also they don't have to have a spare laptop either which adds to the cost.

And last, Windows is the least secure system of all the main three out there( I use it only for gaming).

Just store your seed in an encrypted folder on the cloud.  Eliminates the need for USB sticks and is just as secure.

What encryption method  are you using to store this in the cloud?