Bitcoin Forum

Flexcoin the bitcoin bank will be launching over the weekend the first user defined cold storage facility for the bitcoin online currency.

The users will be able to define what they want sent to cold storage. Meaning if a client has 10 bitcoins with flexcoin, he can specify that he wants 4 of them sent to cold storage. This effectively puts them off line and inaccessible.

Cold Storage is roughly akin to sending your bitcoins to a computer that isn’t online, hence the threat of any online hacking is effectively nill as it’s very difficult to hack a computer that is unplugged.

What makes cold storage with flexcoin so alluring is that all bitcoins in cold storage receive discount payments the same way they are with the normal flexcoin service. Flexcoin has built a secure way to bring them out of cold storage, as they are processed the next business day subjecting them to human review before being released.

This allows individuals to safely store their bitcoins, and earn payments when they are being stored. This is a first for the bitcoin community. All the details will be released on flexcoin over the weekend!

http://www.tribbleagency.com/?p=8178

Do you offer any kind of insurance for cold storage BTC?  Like what if there were a fire/flood/earthquake and the storage machine was destroyed?

That "flood" would have to destroy a physical bank vault..  As well a other backup locations offline

So the insurance will be really cheap?

Maybe free...   Included in tx fee..  Researching

are you using nlocktime to 'time lock' the bitcoins?

Will

Care to go into fine grained detail about EXACTLY how the cold storage works and is architected/engineered? I don't see much useful content on the site regarding the feature, so, being a system architect myself, I would not trust this unless I knew what level of redundancy of service you are using. The following would be good to ensure:

• Are the servers (web/app/db/file) setup for High Availability with at least N+2
• Is the core infrastructure network multi-homed and are the servers and switches/routers all setup with bonded/trunked connections
• What RAID level are you running to store the wallet files, with what level of parity(double or triple), and are you employing a file checksum system like Tripwire to ensure any compromised files can be reported on
• What OS are you using on the systems to ensure you aren't hit by a microsoft-only worm or trojan?
• Is your network (on each system and at the border, DMZ, and core) hardened via VLANs, Port Filtering, IDS/IDP
• Are you duplicating/replicating data off-site with encryption on the wire and on the filesystems?
• What is the process/procedure for human interaction with the wallet files and methods used to securely handle their contents?
• What level of SLA are you assuring for this service - since you are dealing with monetary funds (as much as BTC can be defined that way), people will want to be sure they will absolutely get a response to their requests and services within a specific time frame.

if you are referring to a safe deposit box, i would not trust this...

So you also run an ad agency huh? Interesting...