Bitcoin Forum

Recently, I have been reading articles about wallets, the safest I read about are paper wallets and hardware wallets. I prefer hardware wallets but they are expensive for my liking for now and I want to consider going for a paper wallet. But according to wikipeia, paper wallets generate only one address which means only one address for transaction. i think it is not a good alternative for me.

Paper wallets for hodling
Paper wallets should be used for only holding, it was common in 2012 to around 2016, but whales do like and prefer hardware wallets now because it is more easy to understand and use than a paper wallet. For now, paper wallet can still be good for holding but it is good to send the coins you want to hold on it at ones.

Why paper wallet is not encouraged now
I will say paper wallet is not good to use now, because of the price of bitcoin, it is good in the past when bitcoin price was rising but unlike now, a good holder need a hardware wallet which he can still be able to convert from one coin to another, make transactions. A complete holder, can still withdraw to stanble coins or fiat as a safe haven when bitcoin price is falling. If someone can afford hardware wallet, it is better.

Paper wallet is cumbersome to use, need good knowledge about it before use and before holding if you want one. It can be burned in fire accident, it can be destroyed by water or other liquids, that is why I do not like it. But for safety, it is still good because its private keys are offline.

"Classic" paper wallets contain a single private key and a single address, as you say. You can run in to problems with them if you attempt to spend less than the full amount of bitcoin stored on the address, as the wallet you import your paper wallet to may send your change to an address you do not have the private key for. You need to create a brand new paper wallet each time to send the change to, which is time-consuming. However, the entire point of paper wallets is for long-term cold storage where you aren't making frequently withdrawals, so this becomes less of an issue.

Some people would also refer to a seed phrase written down on paper as a paper wallet. While this isn't a paper wallet by the original definition of the term, it is a much better solution for long term storage rather than a single private key and address.

Why would someone who is planning to hold bitcoin offline for an extended period of time be wanting to convert their cold storage to some useless altcoin? If you want to make frequent trades and transaction, then obviously a paper wallet is not the right choice.

As can a hardware wallet, or a mobile wallet, or a software wallet.

I think you have already got most of the possible answer from previous poster's reply.

There is a complete topic about bitcoin wallets and anyone can easily find that on this section's pinned post area. If you missed that then You may take a look on this topic. [General] Bitcoin Wallets - Which, what, why? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1631151.0)

Paper wallets are better than hardware wallet even but it is only best when you follow the safe strategy to generate paper wallets.

They are trader, not holder. Holders don't sell their bitcoin frequently on price pump and dump. They have a target point where they will sell their BTC. No matter how dump bitcoin have, they will still hold their coin in their bag. You have messed up trader and holder.

If you are sure to be holding your coins for a very long time and knows how to keep the paper wallet safe, its still an option. But many might not recommend to use it especially after bullrun, you have a good chance of doubling or tripling the number of your coins if you sell them for stablecoins and hold til the price drops to its bottom. The last bullrun made people realize its convenient to use hardware wallet.

Personally I don't have one but I only have electrum in my laptop and desktop. Nothing special but I backed them up in my usd drive for safety.

I just like the type of holding in a way holders sell before bitcoin price decrease, or should I call it swing trading which is the right term. And some traders always hold stable coin or dollar as a safe haven. For instance, in March 2020, bitcoin price dumped from $10500 to $3600, some traders holding tether or dollar converted it to bitcoin because they knew the price will pump up again. This is what new holders are actually doing now unlike last decade and old holders. That is why I still always recently thinking paper wallet is not the good option for me.


Electrum wallet is an online wallet, I even read is an open source wallet created long time ago, people claimed online wallets are not secure but electeum wallet really is worth of saving bitcoin. We are different people with different opinion though, I just like electrum for saving little amount of bitcoin, and I have coinomi for sophisticated reasons. I do not have hardware wallet for now, but planning to get ledger nano x which I believe has overtook paper wallets trend of last decade.

I agree but can you see this in another way around also.

If you buy bitcoin for over a year before selling it means you are still a  holder, some hodl longer. There are whales that hold even for long before selling and the selling can mildly shake bitcoin price. Of you do not sell bit coin for a long time means you are investing in it and t means you are hodling.

Take a look at this good example
When bitcoin price was decreased last year in March 2019 to $3800, someone can buy bitcoin and be so lucky to hold until the price was $10000 again this year before selling it. Is that not hodl?

And, I did not mean selling bitcoin frequently, it can take six months or longer but in a way that will favour them.

This is simple, everyone has different opinions and different method about how to hold bitcoin, if I want to hold my bitcoin for long without tampering with it, then, paper wallet is good to use. But like you said, as hard as it is to compromize paper wallet is also as not easy to use, but using it is safe.
But for me, I will prefer to get hardware wallet instead of paper wallets which is easy and more convenient to use, the the fact still remain that my private keys is offline.

It's a good options for long term holding of your coins but if you are going to trade a lot and from time to time hardware wallet is the best choice for that, I know it's quite expensive but it's part of your investment portfolio that you secured it to the safest wallet there is, I have some of my coin in my hardwallet but these are a portion of the coins I allocate for long term, I still need to trade from time to time I also need desktop wallet just secure your keys and passphrase.

Of course, you can still use it as a good option but only if you have enough knowledge on how to store it in the safest way possible. Some people preferred using it more than a hard wallet but I don't recommend it myself because in the long run you might using it more often and causing it to damage. Anyway, if you don't have enough resources to buy a hard wallet, you can try using a paper wallet as your temporary storage not recommended in the long run though. You still need to consider buying your own hard wallet in the future. 

paper wallets have always been a good option and nothing about that has not changed.

in fact nowadays paper wallets may be even safer than hardware wallets and i'll explain why. security is not something that just exists, that you can click a button and be 100% safe! it doesn't work like that. security is achieved through a lot of work and care and it will never be 100%. people who use hardware wallets are lulled into thinking they are 100% safe just because they are using a "hardware wallet" then they end up losing their money. there have been lots of cases where people lost their bitcoin stored in different hardware wallets. but when they use paper wallets, usually they take a lot of care, go offline,... to create it as safe as possible and it is kept offline so the chances of loss is lower.

in other words people have to learn how to use different wallet types and how to make them secure.

Paper is not strong enough against water, fire, and any other physical threats. In addition, using third-party paper wallet services is unsafe too.

You can do it yourself by using Bitcoin Core or any SPV wallet, such as Electrum, to create your own wallet with private keys/ mnemonic seeds. Do it all offline to avoid any threats from online space. You have full control on your private keys/ mnemonic seeds.

Then, you can print them on paper. Do it offline too. It is not different from paper wallet provides by third party but you have higher safety.

For those keys, seeds, you must save them in other places, in other methods, rather than totally rely on paper backups. That is so risky. But you must not back them ups online, because you put your keys/seeds under risks.

Key point: Do it all offline when you create your wallet, make back ups.

I love the physical bitcoins which is the same concept as a paper wallet. I have yet to peel one so it keeps me from spending it or panic selling :D

Importation of Bitcoin paper wallet Into another wallet won't take more than a second to show up in your new wallet, this is not a problem at all, paper wallet are the safest option, if bitcoin surge to a new ATH just import your paper wallet and you are set

It can also be used offline, so you could use it as a paper wallet (by generating keys on a machine that has never touched, or never touch the internet), or even a de facto hardware wallet (by using a persistent Linux flash drive (https://www.howtogeek.com/howto/14912/create-a-persistent-bootable-ubuntu-usb-flash-drive/) that will never touch the internet).

Anyway, it seems like your reason for not suggesting paper wallets is better suited towards traders who need to be able to transact on the fly, rather than holders who just want cold storage. Don't get me wrong though, hardware wallets certainly give paper wallets some heavy competition, but its only real advantage is convenience -- something which not everyone is willing to pay money for. They also cater to different needs, so they're not entirely comparable.

I know about this, but you need two device for this, one will be used for making transaction and for knowing about bitcoin balance, it will not contain the private key, the other device will contain the private key, not connected to bluetooth or internet to make it safe. You can also use phone for it or computers.

Paper wallets are good for coins that are still very cheap that you will need to hold for several years, for example pundix or Tron, as for Bitcoin it's bad idea locking your coins away, Bitcoin can gain 50% per day unexpectedly, you can easily take out your profit and buy back when price fall.

Paper wallets or whatever wallets are only good if you know how to use and how to secure it.

I don't understand what is your opinion when you said paper wallets are good for cheap coins. Personally, I disagree with it. Bitcoin was cheap in the past, now it values above $9000. Cheap altcoins nowadays have their different future and some of them will become expensive like we saw ETH, DASH, Ripple in 2017 and very early 2018.

Whenever you spend your money to invest, you have to secure your funds, from chosen wallets (paper wallets for instance).

I think that the main point in his sentence was about coins one chooses to HOLD for many years and the addition of the "cheap" part ruined it all.
So yes, paper wallets are great for long term hold, no matter the coins are cheap or not.

However, as you said, nowadays it's easier to just generate a mnemonic seed and store that one for long term. Human readable words are easier to hide in plain sight than something that clearly looks like a private key.
Just Electrum is not the best example, its seed works only with Electrum. Ian Coleman's tool is a better call.

the concept is actually a little different. the physical bitcoins mainly server the purpose of a "collectible" and is mainly bought and traded by collectors. as a result of this purpose, the value of them can be well above the total value of the bitcoin they are storing. to sell them, you don't peel it off, selling is usually done by selling the physical coin itself to another collector.

Yeap, Electrum is only one of SPV wallet. People can choose non-custodial wallet for their preference and do relevant steps to created, secure, and backup their wallets. During the process of create, secure, backup wallets, and during the lifespan, if one mistype their wallets' private keys into the search box of Google or browser's address space, they should move their funds immediately and dispose that wallet forever.

Exposing private keys to search engines is so bad.

There's a lot misconceptions here. Hardware wallet are not immune to elements either, and you'd need a very good fire-proof safe to protect any kind of wallet from those accidents.

Paper or hardware wallets aren't the only methods of storing keys offline, even storing them on a CD, floppy disc or a USB stick still counts as offline storage.

But offline storage alone isn't a guarantee that your keys won't be stolen. Most of the times coins are stolen when you access them, for example when you enter your seed or private key into a fake wallet software, or when you have malware on your computer that logs keystrokes or can steal private keys from RAM. Hardware wallet protects from all that because the key is used in a secure isolated environment. If you want to achieve the same with a paper wallet, you need to make your own cold storage setup (https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/coldstorage.html?highlight=usb).

Electrum is a software wallet. It is a much safer variant than web/online wallets hosted by third parties. Compared to Coinomi it is certainly a better option if we are only talking about a place to store Bitcoin. Coinomi is closed-source but it is a multi-currency wallet which is a plus.

A properly generated paper wallet is the best you can do security wise. Hardware wallets are close but still in 2nd place. And I say that as a hardware wallet user myself. Don't think about hardware wallets as too expensive. Consider how expensive it would be to lose your coins for not paying enough attention on security.

This is true, but in what scenario is someone inputting their private keys in to a search engine? Most people shouldn't even be handling their private keys; that's the whole point of having a secure wallet to handle them for you. Even having your private keys revealed in plain text or copied to your clipboard on a computer with internet access is a risk. I would suggest if you have entered your private key in to a search engine, even accidentally, you look again at your security set up to figure out how and why that even happened. This is a potentially catastrophic and completely preventable mistake.

This is true, but only if the removable media was generated from an airgapped computer and is only ever plugged in to an airgapped computed. If you create a USB stick with private keys from an internet enabled device, that's not offline storage.

I agree, but with the caveat that it is set up properly. A lot of newbies do not have the knowledge or skills to do this, and end up creating insecure paper wallets. For these users, a hardware wallet is a better choice.

When they have a transaction need to be confirmed or need to give receiving address to trade partners. When they copy and paste receiving address, they mistakenly copy and paste private key. It is uncommon mistake but I think it can happen. Human can make mistakes and sometimes their mistakes are catastrophic. If they do such mistakes and don't move funds to another wallet, and if that wallet is compromised, that will be a truly catastrophic money-lost lesson.

Thats very tight security. I'd not be surprised if someone did search their private key in the url.  Checking perhaps if there is a similar private key with his out of curiosity I guess.

But this is why before doing something, one has to double-check to make sure all are correct. If you have mistakenly sent funds before, you should be checked many times if possible before executing the transaction. You'd be thinking over and over why and how before you sleep if you mistakenly did it even if its just $200 worht of BTC.

That is what I am trying to say, hardware wallets are just better, paper wallets are complex, it is the type of wallet I can not use. With the current situation of bitcoin price, I prefer hardware wallets than using a complex, hard to know paper wallet.

Genuine question - which wallet are you using where extracting your private key as simple as copying the wrong field? Most wallets will require you to go in to the console (such as dumpprivkey in Bitcoin Core), or go through a specific menu and click on a specific option to access your private key (such as Electrum). Copying your private key shouldn't be as easy as hitting Ctrl+C with the wrong field selected.

There's no doubt that paper wallets are more complex than hardware wallets, but that doesn't necessarily make hardware wallets "better". It depends on what you are looking for in a wallet. Hardware wallets are easier to use and more convenient, sure, but securely generated paper wallets are better for long term cold storage than hardware wallets are.

For paper wallets, you could do that if you store your private keys & addresses in a plain text or PDF file. Back when I used them, there were times when I even scanned the privkey instead of the address by mistake as I did not fold the privkey part of the printed wallet.

Especially as a newbie, this could easily happen - it's the lack of basic crypto knowledge and the huge lack of basic cybersecurity education at its best; I could bet a significant part of BTC holders keep a copy of the paper wallets or .dat files in cloud storage as "backup".

Sure, but that goes back to the point I made in my post further up this page. Having such easy access to your private key(s) is a security risk, especially for newbies who may not fully understand those risks. Obviously you should never have your private keys saved in plain text, and the whole point of using a good wallet is to handle your private keys for you to reduce the risk of something going wrong. If the wallet openly displays your private keys and makes it so easy to copy them that a single misclick can leak them, then your wallet is barely any better than a text file and I would suggest re-examining your security set up and taking steps to prevent this from happening.

Oh absolutely. There are also a worrying number of people who store private data in web based email accounts like Googlemail. You have absolutely no idea just how many servers around the world now have a copy of your private keys on them and just how many people have remote or even physical access to those servers. It's even worse than using a web wallet, and that's saying something.

Write seed on paper, and give it in a custody of bank. The best of both worlds.  :P

They are good for long term storage, if you do transactions frequently and want security then hardware wallets are good.

I'm not sure it is. That set up involves a lot of trust in a third party (the bank), which I would not be comfortable giving them. Are you absolutely sure no one at the bank will ever take a peek at the piece of paper you give them to store? Even if you go in to their vault yourself and lock it in a safe deposit box yourself, you have absolutely no way of knowing that they don't have another key which can open your box. You are placing complete trust in their security set up and their staff.

If you are going to trust a third party to hold your seed for you, be it a bank, a lawyer, a friend, whomever, then it would be a wise move to encrypt it first.

My bad, you are right. Encrypted seed (in pen drive or similar storage)+ bank vault would be best of both worlds.

There are many wallets that don't give you the private key or the seed phrase. There are also some wallets that give you the private key, but they are not safe. Because they have access to your private keys as well. For example, blockchain wallet give you the seed phrase and you can recover your wallet using your seed phrase at any time, but since the wallet is not open source, that's not safe. Because we don't know whether they have access to our private key and seed phrase or not.

Even then the seed might be seized by the government if for example they will decide to outlaw crypto and will have a suspicion that this is a Bitcoin private key, and while they wouldn't take your coins if the encryption is strong, you might be locked out of your coins if it's the only copy. If you want to be even more safe and store coins in bank for decades, it would be better to first use steganography to hide the encrypted seed in some innocent files, like family photos, and then optionally encrypt the photos. So, in case something like what I described will happen, you'll have plausible deniability and might even avoid raising any suspicion.

Paper wallets, airgapped PC or mobile wallets, and (good) hardware wallets are all permanently offline. Your private keys and seed phrases are therefore safe from any attack via the internet or any malware.

Wallets on a PC or mobile device with internet access are vulnerable to attackers accessing your device via the internet or to malware transmitting your keys or seed phrase to a malicious third party via the internet.

If you have done this on a non-airgapped computer (i.e. a computer with internet access, even if you disconnected from the internet while you did it), then your coins are at risk. Your seed has been saved on your computer in plain text, and could well still exist on your hard drive even if you have deleted the unzipped PDF file. It could have been or could be accessed by malware or a malicious attacker. Further, you need to ensure that the compression software you are using uses a proper encryption algorithm when password protecting files.

I can't agree here.
Both have their use and have their advantages and disadvantages.
For example paper wallet is free. You can print it or just write your keys on piece of paper, done.
Hardware wallet is somewhat expensive and you must trust software it contains and its wallet. you must trust delivery and manufacturing so a little bit too much trust there.
Paper wallet can't fool you and its free.

Paper wallet can stil be great for keeping and holding your crypto and bitcoin,
but only if you create it offline and in proper way.
Lot of people are not doing it in correct way or they they become victims of phishing scam.
Good to readbitcoin wiki page on paper wallets:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Paper_wallet

I have a hardware wallet which i used once for some time. Emty now, just laying around.
Paperwallets is king for long term. For smaller, mobile or destop

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box-theft.html

You'd never catch me doing such a thing.

And bank vaults are a dying breed at least where I am. The nearest one to me is about 150 miles away and they're closing at a fast rate.

I may well go back to paper wallets for funds that have no intention of moving for a long time. They worked for me in the past. I get the feeling hardware wallets will get ever more holes uncovered.

Why did you limit the options to black and white? Which means of security of bitcoin are hardware wallets and paper wallets, there are many options with high security and the most reliable.

Paper wallets are used for gifts and for storage when you want to move to a country or other item, but they are not suitable as a way to store all of your savings.
You can buy a phone at a much cheaper price than device wallets and convert it to a solid device.
You can also use an old computer and turn it into secure hardware.
You can try USB and open source OS.

Personal, I think gifting paper wallets is bad idea. The recipient of the paper wallet has to trust completely that the sender has created and printed the paper wallet in a secure fashion, and also has to trust completely that the sender isn't keeping a copy of the private keys for themselves. Any time I have wanted to gift bitcoin I've just made a normal transaction, and the one time I received a paper wallet as a gift I swept the funds immediately to my own wallet. If you are giving a gift of bitcoin to someone who is new to bitcoin and does not have their own wallet yet, then all the more reason not to use a paper wallet and instead teach them how to securely and safely store their own funds without relying on third parties.

Why not? If we are talking about savings, i.e. money that you are holding long term as opposed to money you are spending day-to-day, then paper wallets are one of the best ways to store your savings.

Even a phone in airplane mode can still receive radio frequency data, and can still connected to WiFi, Bluetooth, or other connectivity methods. If you want to create your own airgapped device, better to use an old laptop with the WiFi (+/- Bluetooth) hardware physically removed.

Unless you know what you're doing, the bolded lines may have even more & worse security holes than a paper/hardware wallet.

Why isn't a paper wallet suitable way of storing all savings? I mean, as soon as it's created and stored the right way, it's just as safe as all the other methods when created & stored properly.

There are so many possibilities of losing your wallets with every method that there's no perfect way to store them properly. You could easily lose your computer/USB/phone in a fire or if the disk inside the device fails without the possibility of recovery. Even our mind has flaws: you could simply have a bad memory loss after an accident and there goes everything you had.

I stored some of my BTC on paper wallets for many years without touching them and had zero issues when transferring them back into a hot wallet.


If you cannot properly store very important data on your own, then the worst thing you can do is give it to someone else to do it for you imo, lol. While you enjoy your life on a sunny beach, there may be a few guys trying to decrypt your wallets behind the scenes. Or the government itself, if they consider it's worth it.

I barely trust my own storage & encryption methods although most of the times I repeat all steps like 5 times in a row to make sure I still get the same results and did it all properly from the start. Knowing my wallets are in someone else's hands, even encrypted, would constantly stress me the hell out.

Yes it can be a gift, but why exactly woudl you want to carry it on you when moving to a country? Its in a country already if someone operates a note.
Why not post it here or sent by email, or as text it on a phone or whatever..... What exactly will you do about it?
https://i.ibb.co/VQ8nvyY/Untitled.png (https://imgbb.com/)
]

What?

yes,
yes,
yes cand do

Not sure if this is a troll post or not, but I don't think there's anything worse than posting your encrypted paper wallet on a forum or sending it through e-mail...

You can literally transfer $10,000,000,000 on a paper, fold it, put it in your pocket and go wherever you'd like without having even the best scanner in the world knowing you have that much money on you.. Compared to gold or other stuff they can find at the airport or that is large & heavy enough to be suspicious.

First it depents on amount, second come on tell me what you do about? Go ahead tell me all about that paper wallet.

Amount doesn't matter. Having a paper wallet worth $5 stolen would annoy me just as much as one worth $100 would. Moreover, it'd even get me skeptical to a point where I wouldn't trust any of my own wallets as I'd know thefts have happened before so my storage method is clearly flawed.

If you think transferring a significant amount of BTC to an encrypted paper wallet and then posting it here is a good method just because it has a password on it, then good luck with that. I'd literally be on my toes and stressed out desperately checking my balance every minute to make sure the money is still there until I get to the other part of the world where I'm supposed to use it.


Read my last post again. I'm quite sure you don't write your accounts or credit card PIN on walls when you don't want to forget them.

Read my last post again. I'm quite sure you don't write your accounts or credit card PIN on walls when you don't want to forget them.
[/quote]
You seem somewhat confused, bank accounts and credit card pin's have nothing to do with Bitcoin.
No would not most my 4 digit pin #.
Still waiting on particulars of the paper wallet and when and how to took all of it.

This is something I've never quite got my head around. How do people think these third parties are storing their coins? On an airgapped machine or hardware wallet? Maybe. Hopefully. I'm sure many just use plain old software hot wallets though. What's the thought process here? "I don't trust my own software wallet, so I'll store my coins in someone else's software wallet instead, and hope they continue to allow me to access them?" Makes no sense.

If you aren't confident in storing coins yourself, the correct next step is to learn how to remedy that problem, and not assume even larger risks by giving away complete control to someone else.

In this hypothetical scenario of carrying bitcoin across a border, I would also prefer to carry an encrypted wallet in some form on my person. Indeed, I have done just that several times without any issues whatsoever. If, however, I was unduly concerned about being searched and it being found because I was Edward Snowden or something, then storing it encrypted online isn't necessarily dangerous. Provided I used a secure encryption algorithm and a long and random encryption key, then I could quite safely store it online, especially if it is only going to be for a short period of time (say, the 12-24 hours needed to take a flight, get through the border, retrieve the data, and sweep the bitcoin to a new wallet).

The caveat to this is the long and random encryption key. To be as secure as a 24 word phrase, you would need 39 random characters drawn from the full ASCII set. Are you going to write that down and carry that across the border? Are you going to try to remember that? I would argue that remembering 24 random words is easier than 39 random characters. As stupid as relying on your memory as a back up is, this might be a case where remembering your seed phrase is the least risky option.

^^^ Why carry it into a country if it is alread in the country? Most country someone has a note running.
6PnYYQefG5g4otFwJgWdzYrSXdRoWgQykNqx8qtPELEj62C8mrYCALAXuN
I can sent the damn thing by morse code if i want to.

Or as poem on a postcard anyone can read it, so what?
6 years
Paul
not
You
Yourself
Quit
end
.....

Artwork on public display, Bedroom... (as we know encrypted always starts with 6 its so it's emitted)
https://i.ibb.co/30VFzR4/Untitled.png (https://imgbb.com/)

If someone is stupit enough not to remember a 8 character password, it does not deserve a coin.

This is the best case scenario, where you have the right password length & combination and where you store the proper thing the right way. We have some encrypted ".dat" files on the forum that you have most likely seen too around, which haven't been decrypted in a decade.

But the average Joe would think that the same password they've used on 100 other accounts, although long and complicated, is secure to use for a paper wallet encryption and post it on a forum too when you have password leaks happening every day so the long, very complex password might actually be a Google search away. I can't even recall how many times I thoroughly thought of a security process to make sure everything is as should be, but months later I found out a very little thing I forgot could've led to the compromise of the provided security all that time.

Hence, I'd rather take the encrypted key with me on a piece of paper and take just as much care of it as I would of my physical fiat wallet; I think it's the best suggestion one can give to the average person. Honestly, unless you are a very important/suspicious person as you said Snowden would be, I think the chances are almost non-existent that someone would check out what you wrote on a piece of paper. At least for now, because if Bitcoin ever becomes the norm, expect paper thieves to exist, lol.

I personally do not trust online backups of any sort, especially financial assets. Online means possibility of leaving fingerprints in a server you don't own and, if anyone is interested in running with their Bitcoins from someone/something, I guess it'd be even worse to leave traces.

EDIT: The "average Joe" part now makes even more sense after Tash's reply:

And anyone who is stupid enough to encrypt their wallet with an 8 character password before broadcasting it across the internet is likely to end up with their password bruteforced and their coins stolen.

Agreed. Not only are you placing complete trust in these centralized cloud servers much like you have to with centralized web wallets and exchanges, but once any data is uploaded to these servers you have to assume it will never be deleted. All my back ups are created manually, offline, encrypted, and stored in physically secure locations. It's not as convenient as using DropBox or iCloud, but I know my data is never going to be involved in one of their many many leaks, hacks, or breaches.