Bitcoin Forum

What is your opinion now on online wallets? After the big scandal with inputs.io. Do you still think they are safe to use? Do you think some of them may scam us like the way TradeFortress, owner of inputs.io, has been accused of doing?

stay away from online wallets. use btc client with a virtual machine!!!

My opinion is the same as it was before inputs.io
Avoid like plague.

What if whatever you stored your Bitcoins on stopped working? I know people who have lost a lot of BTC due to their phone breaking or their computer messing up to the point where a reformat is required.

You should always have back-ups of your wallet. A computer format or phone breaking shouldn't matter. Now that BTC is looking like it's going to stick around, securing your bitcoins should be a top priority.

Stay away from online wallets. That includes Coinbase. You're asking for trouble. At best, there will be times when you want to access your coins and you can't, simply because they are not under your control.

An online wallet = your coins are not yours.

Well that's why backups are for. I 'm not saying that local wallets are 100% secure because they are vulnerable to malwares etc. but at least your coins' fate is in your hands.

I notice a lot of people are saying CoinBase has problems? Could you tell me what they are? And do similar problems exist with BlockChain?

If you own an amount that you consider significant, it's probably a good idea to think about buying a cheap offline machine to store your coins.... tablet, netbook, something cheap.

They have so many more ways they can be hacked & stolen compared to desktop wallets.

If you care about the security of your funds, use Qt or Electrum.

Or learn to use paper wallets...

Sure, paper wallets are useful. However, I hate to break them. So I prefer to keep my coins on an offline machine in the case that I need to move funds. If I need to send an output, I can sign it on the offline machine and send from an online machine.

I 'm not aware of any particular problems. You may search the forum to see if there are any. I 'm talking about the concept of online wallets that store your private keys. That i don't like.

Blockchain.info does use javascript, if I remember correctly. Malicious code could be used to compromise accounts. It is much better than hosted/3rd party wallets, though, which actually control your private keys.

I have no expierence with online wallets.

I prefer using the official client wich is the savesst

I don't trust online wallets at all :D

Don't use online wallets, use btc client from official site.

Yes it is way better since they store your wallet encrypted. Still you should keep a backup of your keys locally.

These are not secure and do not last long. Never have there substantial amount of BTC. Only exception might be blockchain.info as they dont have your private key