Bitcoin Forum

I was reading some stories about huge Bitcoin thefts and I was wondering, how the hell they would cash out. They must be so paranoid, with 100 of thousands of USD in Bitcoins that they have stolen sitting in a wallet.

I also read a story about a guy on Silkroad scamming, just curious.

We used to be such a nice community, perhaps BTC is better when 10,000 BTC buys pizza for dinner. :D

scam board https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=83.0

I think they're probably keeping it in their wallet and slowly buying things with it. idk?  The moral of the story is this. Don't keep large sums of money in insecure online wallets.

Bitcoin is anonymous if you want it to be.

It just blows my mind, I admit it kind of scared me away from Bitcoins but I noticed Namecheap started accepting them and it kind of won me back.

Early on there was little attention paid to security because there was a small group of people involved. Imagine living in a house with a bunch of roomates and putting a lock on the refrigerator. It was unneccesary.

Then after a theft or two people started considering security. A lot of people would use encryption programs on their wallet and decrypt whenever they needed to send bitcoins. But that was a hassle.

Finally they included the option to encrypt your wallet right in the bitcoin client. That helped a lot.

Then there are the merchants getting hacked. This problem stems from companies having many people with access to the bitcoins which would allow any one of them to take it and claim a "hack". One exchange was hacked as they were transferring the business to someone that bought them out but the wrong person was given the password and they were able to get access.

I believe there is still some work to be done on the business level for securing bitcoins. Many are doing well with the cold storage solution but there is more that can be done.

The armory client was created to give a solution to security.

I personally prefer to just create a public and private key and protect the private key my own way.

How would I go about securing my 5 measly Bitcoins, I have the normal wallet from the site and have encrypted it but unsure how else to secure for long term storage. I know it isn't much but it's what I can afford to loose at this present time. Would, backing up the Wallet to a USB drive or 2 of them and storing them in my safe until I wanted to cash out be the best bet.

Google 'paper bitcoin wallet' or 'offline bitcoin wallet'

I like to do this:

Download the Vanity Generator (https://github.com/downloads/samr7/vanitygen/vanitygen-0.22-win.zip)

Run the vanity generator:
C:\>vanitygen.exe 1Josh
Difficulty: 4476342
Pattern: 1Josh
Address: 1JoshvL2trzgd5PPmA8rj4M9xKz3o2Xek3
Privkey: 5Jdx2v395JTGJCE5uw6ukfGz8otQ7hT7Y64xpZiBfBhn2WRCdpV

Take the Address and copy it to wherever you want, send it to yourself in an e-mail, put it in your forum signature, whichever...

Take the Privkey and do whatever you feel is the the safest way of securing it. Write it down on a piece of paper, print it out, stamp it into metal, scratch it into the floor under your bed, whichever. That is the key to spending your money.

The only way someone could hack you this way is if they have a screen capture type of virus. Or you could run that program on a computer that is not ever going to be connected to the Internet ever again if you are super paranoid.

You are all set. Send all of your bitcoins to your Address. If you need to spend you can use the standard bitcoin client to spend using your private key.

False. Viruses could compromise the vanitygen.exe executable so that it sends all results to a central server, or, even easier, so it always starts with the same seed.

That too...you can always verify the PGP signature to make sure the binary is not compromised as well as running it offline.

Bitcoins make me a nervous wreck lol, god knows how people can get 1000's in one wallet.