Bitcoin Forum

as a gold/silver bug since 2005, i have finally sold off 98% of my bullion holdings and moved it into bitcoin.

it occurred to me after removing the last remaining ounces from my home safe that i am much relieved to not be storing a large stash of bullion at home anymore.  when leaving on vacations with my family like we will be doing for a week this coming Friday, i would always worry in the back of my mind that my house might get burglarized.

at one time i had a stash stored at Credit Suisse in Switzerland but got spooked about them during the banking crisis of 2008 before bringing it home.  i also considered storing it in a safety deposit box at my local bank but was advised that if the banking system went insolvent they could repossess it. 

i even looked at storing it offsite in a private vault but it was very expensive.  so i just decided to put it into 2 separate safes here at home. 

now i no longer have to worry about it.

and you know what?  i feel MORE secure storing all my bitcoins in an offline wallet, the balance of which i can check in the block chain at any time...

Ah, the worry of storing physical gold in the house when going on cross country vacations, a problem I know all too well.  Viva La Bitcoin.

What if your computer containing your wallet gets stolen?
Computers are a nice theft target, after all.
That goes double for laptops, especially on vacation.

The liveCD method is good, though it depends on the label on the CD of course.  And on the CD being stored somewhere that prevents it from getting ripped off with all the rest of your cds/dvds.

Nothing is safe, really.
I think gold is rather less likely to plunge to 10% of it's current value than BTCs are, a good solid government/bank backed campaign would do terrible things to bitcoin, while gold is relatively safe in that way.

Gold in a coffee can buried in the back yard is probably the safest, really.

i have used the Live CD Ubuntu technique with my wallet having never touched the hard drive and made multiple copies stored on Ironkeys at the bank and in a couple of other locations.  they have Silver Bullet protection which means they have to connect over the Internet to ironkey.com to open.  not more than 10 attempts can be made to the encrypted password before it locks down.  by the time they've stolen it, i'd know about it and have activated the self destruct function (Silver Bullet) which will destroy all the data on the key once opened.  most burglars won't even know whats on it and probably wouldn't steal them even if they got in.

gold and silver coins can be identified immediately and take up alot of space.

I would rather have encrypted the wallet with GNU PG and stored it in paper or optical disk.

please elaborate.

I really dont see BTC being around in 5,000-10,000-25,000-2 million years.  Do you?

Gold will be laying ,or being worn, somewhere.

I hope your bullion was only a small percentage of your investment portfolio.  If not putting 98% into anything, let alone something in its infancy, is a major gamble.  I hope you don't have any dependents.  The last thing I would want to see is someone getting wiped out so I wish you the best of luck but yikes....

I'm not sure I even believe humans will be around 2 million years from now. All that matters to me is the next 20-50 years. This guy isn't trying to pass on the wealth to his descendants 5,000 years in the future.

In 5,000 year, I expect gold will be a by-product of our cold-fusion reactors. There'll be more of it than we know what to do with. There will be landfills full of the stuff.

If gold has any value in the distant future, it will be manufactured. Completely silly to think gold is a good store of value for the next 25,000-2,000,000 years.

Yeh, now you have to worry about

1) harddrive crashes
2) theft of your laptop
3) harddrive physical failures


I guess that's it.

1 and 3 are the same thing. Encryption and backup solves everything. And it looks like he has gone above and beyond that.

The problem with gold is that speculators have already driven the price way too high to be an effective hedge against inflation.  Bitcoins at least still have room to grow.

precisely

How would he do that?

%
i said 98% OF MY BULLION.

by explaining why he thinks GPG, paper, or optical disk is a superior storage technique than what i've done.

What's your address again?

(MoonShadow wonders where he put that metal detector)

once you've moved your savings wallet offline properly you don't have to worry about those issues until you want to dig into it.  for me, that'll be at least  10 yrs from now.

Sure.

Regarding GNU PG, a quote from it's official site: "GnuPG (http://gnupg.org/) is the GNU project's (http://www.gnu.org/) complete and free (http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html) implementation of the OpenPGP standard as defined by RFC4880 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4880)" (Links added). You can use GNU PG to encrypt the wallet. I suggest diceware (http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html) for the password. You can dump the encrypted file to a CD or paper with PaperBack (http://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/) or similar.  If you opt for this, remember to make sure the wallet don't gets into hard disk. There is no need to use a Live CD, if you use GNU/Linux (http://www.gnu.org/gnu/linux-and-gnu.html) (I suggest you do (http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html)) just create a new user with the proper umask and /home in a tmpfs (http://www.thegeekstuff.com/2008/11/overview-of-ramfs-and-tmpfs-on-linux/) mount.

The point is to avoid banks or any other third party. Free feel to ask if you need more information in some point.

Bitcoin is for big thinkers.

i certainly respect your opinion on this and you're not the only one who feels this is the way to go.  but why is it better than using an encrypted IronKey with LiveCD?

Which is why I said I hope your bullion is only a small percent of your total portfolio......

I'm assuming by your reply it is. 

Perhaps it's not, but archival storage of paper, under the right conditions, is known to have an indefinate lifespan.  This is not known to be true with regard to solid state digital storage (as in the ironkey) and is already known to not be true with regard to optical disks.

Well, now you'll be checking Mt.Gox every 5 minutes to see if Satoshi decided to dump all his coins at once. Good luck.  ;D

is there a known "average lifespan" of solid state digital storage media?

Gold is currently being produced as a by-product of nuclear fission, albeit in a tiny ratio, along with more expensive elements. However I don't know if it's profitable for reprocessing facilities to extract it from used fuel or whether they're actually extracting the expensive elements other than ¹³⁷Cs. You might want to research further, it's interesting.

P.S: Simplicity and/or standardization and the key for information preservation along lifetimes. It's clear to see paper backup archives both. If I were to use paper backup I would store it together with a written english and spanish (My native languaje) description of it's format and the decodification process.

granted i'm a speculator.  i've had a multi-fold return on the PM's and i just happen to think they're topping.  could be wrong.  but btc fits my criteria for a stable, usable, modern era currency that has lots of room to grow.  the merchant growth is exciting and those 2 Android apps that just came out have convinced me to sell the last remaining stores of my bullion.

the offline wallet though has REALLY relieved alot of the anxiety over btc security. 

i'm not worried about the price of btc as i think the price is just getting started...

as in now i check the Comex?

Maybe, but it means nothing because different products will have different characteristics.

Non standard formats are a major problem for long term data storage. You can see this happen with the formats of the most popular word processor of a couple of years ago. Files in plain text, HTML, gzip, bzip2 are as readable now as they were when they were written. Be sure to use a simple format for your wallet and bundle it's specification together unless you plan to update it with every format change of your favorite Bitcoin implementation. That's my advice.

Regards.

agreed - except i think you're an optimist.  i give gold and silver less than 100 years as a store of wealth.  nope, there's no long-term future in gold.

hell, there's roughly 25 tons of the stuff in every cubic mile of seawater (concentration varies by location), and almost twice that of silver; according to the USGS:

http://ga.water.usgs.gov/edu/whyoceansalty.html

humans have always been pretty good at extracting things from other things - and sooner or later, seawater will be cracked as well.  there's been folks working on it for quite a while.  sooner or later...

Well then, all we need is a big water magnet. I'm going to be rich, lol. Very good points, in a cage match between bitcoins and gold for the long term... I don't know, hard to call. If bitcoins are still around in 2 year, I know who I believe would win. It just needs to make it through these first few years.

as i pointed out on an old thread, once - the longest term storage medium we have yet devised is the LP vinyl record.  not counting chiseled rock, of course.  you can get a custom LP cut (the actual machinery is fairly expensive) by a service, for about 50 USD.

the trick is to get digital information onto and off of an analog medium without any degradation at all.  those USB record-players look interesting, don't they?

how many private keys can you get on one? ;)

i dunno.  it would depend on how much redundancy you felt was adequate.

an LP holds as much music as a CD though - right?  so a few hundred meg, less the data cost of analog>digital translation.

maybe you ought to start a btc storage service  :)

i thought of doing that.  just too many irons in the fire right now.

the idea is free to whoever wants it...

It's analog, there is 0 bytes on it.

edit:
and it would be much cheaper to store everything on paper and scan it instead, MUCH cheaper.

yes, it's analog and has 0 bytes - but an analog signal which is designed to be converted to digital can carry information.  as i pointed out - USB turntables are interesting, and do precisely that.  the trick is to design a way to convert a digital piece of information to an analog signal that can easily be converted back.  i've imagined playing a Word Doc using one's favorite CD player...

Now that's long term investing :)

You feared that the bank will steal your money because their business is bad? Wow, Bitcoin really is for you.

Aluminium was worth more than gold some centuries ago. It was a very precious metal.

Today? Do you want a coca cola?  :D

Gold has a lousy security track record.  It's supposed to be crisis-proof but during wars and economic collapses gold usually gets looted, confiscated, burgled, extorted, lost, and left behind on a massive scale.

What matters is that people perceive gold as secure though, even though in practice it isn't.

Bitcoin definitely has better storage and transportation features than gold. If you have to flee your country and cross borders try doing it with a wheelbarrow full of gold & silver. With bitcoin you can simply send your encrypted wallet up to the cloud and retrieve it on the other side. With that said, bitcoin is still new enough that I am hedging my bets and holding both bitcoin and precious metals.

USB sticks are more portable than gold  :D

short term, long term, it doesn't matter for NO_SLAVE.  its all BAD.

so is the block chain.

what, banks steal?  what am i thinking?

and you can't HIDE it. 

lugging all those bags of silver back to the coin dealer almost broke my back.

It's happened in the past.  What would prevent it in the future?

i know of wealthy ppl who back in the depths of 2008 were yanking $50K out of their bank accts everyday and storing it under their pillows.

David Einhorn of Greenlight Capital has pallets of gold stored in a private vault b/c he doesn't trust anyone else to hold it.

Eric Sprott of Sprott Asset Management holds his gold and silver in a private vault.  He is close to one the largest private holders of PM's in the world.

Have you heard of Bank Holidays?  thats when you can't get your money out when you most need it.

Have you heard of hedge funds locking down their clients accts b/c it would be too disruptive to let you have your own money in times of crisis.

why did the FDIC take their individual acct limit guarantees to unlimited even tho they didn't have the money to insure all depositors back in 2008?

most gold investors DO NOT leave their gold at the banks.

You're right, Bitcoin is for me!

+1

Get a bunch of cans of paint.  Empty one.  Put gold in can.  Put in garage.  No one is going to think your gold is in there.

Or do something similar.  Using a safe is overrated.

I want your address.

Thanks for selling gold and buying BTC. that's exactly the opposite I want to do.

I'm continue selling BTCs while mining them. Sometime next month or so I'll have my rig investment paid off (hopefully). Then I'll continue to sell the additional earned BTCs I mine to buy gold :)

would you like to trade BTC for gold with me?  i have a few ounces left.  where do you live?  seriously....

PM me.

And if you clean out cypherhdoc's inventory and need more I have plenty here:
http://www.GoldStarBullion.com

TraderSteve

Agreeing. Things like gold are unsafe, easy to steal. But bitcoins cannot be stolen, they use cryptology (impossible to crack!), and you can't steal over the internet. If you say "bullion is good", then I reply with "that's a load of bull"

Bitcoin cannot be stolen because it cannot be stolen and it cannot be stolen. It uses cryptology and burglers can't steal over the internet. Impossible. If someone breaks into your house, you lost your gold, guarenteed. There's no safe place to hide it. Impossible. It's shiny and catches the burgler's eye no matter where it is. But you're bitcoins are safe in your internet cyber-wallet because burglers cant touch it. Impossible.