That was a very helpful tip. 

This is encouraging me to try downloading electrum and experimenting with it on e.g. my gentoo install.

I will also make a live distro of tails and try using that on the old PC I have as discussed above as well.

And, with the last hint, I will only buy the TREZOR key in a little while.

I am only dealing with small amounts of coins here. 

Regards

MF

Many thanks for all the replies on this subject.  My way of discussing this is influenced by years of posting on linux distro user lists like
debian and gentoo etc.....

Thus I tend to think that something that is really good and inexpensive could be something that no one uses or knows much about etc.

The BITKEY thing is free as in beer as far as I can see and not commercially oriented much either.

Thus even though TREZOR does cost a little bit of money it is beginning to sound like a good idea now.

Sorry for harping on a bit.

Time to experiment with tails electrum, electrum clones for the altcoins and TREZOR.

Cheers

MF






 

Many thanks for the suggestions and advice on this.  BITKEY is also a distribution of Debian that was designed with cold storage in mind.

See here:

https://distrowatch.com/table.php?distribution=bitkey

https://bitkey.io/

plus usage videos:

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vm0NkC9RVTQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gR0ip9k-r7Y

and also

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HjbDNX87Onk

This site has a section in it that compares TREZOR and BITKEY:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_to_set_up_a_secure_offline_savings_wallet

TREZOR protects against what are termed keyloggers.

BITKEY would not protect against what is termed a hardware keylogger, and not against extortionists.
Apparently you would be storing an unsigned check using it.

If I understand it correctly, Electrum can only trade in bitcoin.  Is that correct?  If so how does
one buy and store altcoins?

I think TREZOR can store some but not all altcoins.  There seem to be a large number of them.

Is there an equivalent of a credit card that exists in the bitcoin world?  Would the interest rate be lower
than conventional banks charge?

I think I need to experiment with different methods and learn as I go along here.

Regards

MF

Dear All,

I bought a small amount of bitcoin about year it two ago at the peak of the price spike.

I realised it was an opportunity much earlier but could afford to buy any.

I used coinbase to make the purchase.

My aims at present are humble and I will listen patiently and attentively to any advice you can give me on the site here.

I want to take a little of the bitcoin and use some software called BITKEY to make an airgap type store of it on a usb stick (I think that is
what you are meant to do using an old PC I have that I don't need to use for any serious purpose.  I can keep it disconnected from the
internet when using it. 

I will run the BITKEY OS from a DVD and follow the instructions on the useful youtube videos to move the bitcoin from coinbase to the usb stick.

Any suggestions or comments you have about doing this or any other alternative suggestions you have would be appreciated.

Once I have done this I am interested to buy a bit more bitcoin and then try buying some altcoins (suggestions on good ones would be
appreciated).

I don't want to buy any altcoins until I have got the hard wallet/BITKEY solution working with ordinary bitcoin.

People say that electrum can be used to buy and store altcoins but it seems that might not be as secure as BITKEY could be if I use it correctly.

I may be wrong here but people on the site can set me straight on this - I would appreciate this.

Cheers

Regards

Michael Fothergill

Many thanks for warning me about this.

I will proceed with caution.

There are people around who would try to steal bitcoin from noobs like me it seems.

Cheers

MF

Dear All,

I recently purchased a little bitcoin. 

I noticed the following advice posted on a twitter account:


I only bought some BTC on Dec 23rd.

It maybe that this is too recent a purchase to take advantage of this offer.

Does anyone know anything about Bitcoin Diamond on this list?

Regards

MF

Dear All,

I finally managed to make a SEPA payment to Coinbase and bought 0.00345 of ordinary bitcoin.

I need to transfer the bitcoin from Coinbase to a long term storage wallet created using BITKEY.

I noticed a twitter feed somewhere saying that "if you have balance on your currently BTC wallet, you can get free Bitcoin Diamonds(BCD) which was accrued to you as a result of hardfork on block 495866".

I googled around and discovered that I think I need to have put the bitcoin in a hard wallet before I can do this and I also think that I need to have bought the bitcoin before Nov 24 to take advantage of this offer.

I only bought the BTC on Dec 23.

Does anyone on the site know much about Bitcoin Diamonds?

Cheers,

MF

Dear Folks,

I entered some credit card details and then tried to buy £50 worth of bitcoin = 0.0562.


How long does the confirm buy take to finalise in coinbase?

Feeling dumb,

Cheers

MF

Many thanks for this tip.

I turned off the flash and took a pic of the front page of my passport in low artificial light holding at the best angle to reduce light reflection to a minimum in coinbase front page upload mode.

For the passport fizzog page I held it open in one hand at the window in very low early morning natural light at a choice angle that got rid of the glare making sure
my fingers did not cover anything readable on the passport.

I then did hit the completed button.

On the pc it switched to: we are uploading this -it may take a few minutes etc.

This time the id was accepted.

Stone the crows!

Should I now add a bank account or credit details etc as they are suggesting and buy a few bitcoins?

Or would you recommend I do that with e.g. GDAX?

I signed up via another coinbase user recommendation so supposedly both he and I get an extra 10% bitcoin when I make the purchase....

Is that a good plan here?

Yours gratefully and ignoramously,

MF



 

PS

Would it help e.g. if I put a pair of sunglasses in front of the mobile camera and took the photo through the sunglass lens?

Or would the image then be too dark?

Cheers

MF

Dear Cryptozoologists,

I am total noob here........

Please can you help me a little.

I watched some videos about bitcoin and I burned a DVD with the Bitkey version of Debian OS and rigged up an old PC to host it ready for long term coin storage.

I then opened a coinbase account and ran into a problem.

The software wants you to take a photo of your passport or driving licence and upload it so it can create some ID for you.

The problem is that it is sensitive to any glare you create on creating the images when the photograph is taken (by Samsung S5 mobile in my case).

I feel as though I need the NASA Hubble space telescope people and Google Earth folks to help here (after they have been on antidepressants for six months as a warm up).

Any suggestions on how to take an ID photo that lights the coinbase candle is most welcome here.

Comments on how to break through the vaporware barrier here are most appreciated.

Regards

Michael Fothergill