First off, you people seem to have an inordinate amount of trust in banks.  'Safe deposit boxes'  Belong to the bank, just like your deposits.  Access is controlled...Not by You.

As for burying laminated paper... Maybe if you live in a desert.  Test your lamination in a bucket of water for double your minimum expected burial time, with many test subjects.  Plastic is water resistant.  For a time.  Not for all time. Better to bury stamped stainless, or even stamped plastic if you worry about metal detectors, or if heat is a zero concern (house fire, wild fire, etc.)

I don't know much about paper wallets. But aren't they basically bearer bonds. Are they pw protected at all? Doesn't asset forfeiture apply to bank safe deposit boxes just as well as accounts?

I don't trust banks full-stop.

Seems like a very physical approach to security.

and now the internet knows all these things

Seems like if you put it in the bank, then you still need one other location, in case the bank burns down or something.  Whether your second location is your home or another bank, it is not so likely that your catastrophic failure is going to happen at both of your locations at the same time, no?

^^^ THIS

I really can't understand guys having a "fortune" in crypto and not owning some hardware wallets. You don't even need to put everything you own into it. Just buy it, play with it and, when you are confident enough, decide how much you want to manage with a hardware wallet, how much in paperwallets, how much in exchanges, in software wallets, etc....

I would just roll some dice about a hundred times (256 bits needed huh), they don't even have to be casino grade. Or shuffle a deck of cards. ... That opendime thing looks interesting too.


I found some code before to generate paper wallets, and dice2key, and nobrainer ... they take input from your keyboard and combine it with other randomness from your computer to spit out completely random private keys.

Here's a paper wallet generator with source code: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=361092

And here's the dice2key one: https://github.com/swansontec/dice2key

But I seem to have found another one similar somewhere else, I have saved it locally on my drive but you may want to go look for an open source version and compile it yourself.

For paper wallet purposes, both bitaddress.org and vanitygen will work just as well. You could also go with something like Warp Wallet and a bunch of random words (or again, dice rolls.)

Then if you had a head injury you could easily lose your fortune.

...or if you make a deal with somebody who will mine for you at a better electricity rate. 

That's what hardware wallets are for... to NEVER let your regular computer know your private keys not even for a brief second (which people with paperwallets will have to do when they decide to claim them).

Unfortunately that advice is of not much help for your recent incident now

Don't forget the being naked while using it part.

the computer where you create the keypair needs to be an ABSOLUTELY SECURE ENVIRONMENT, linux distro with verified checksum that NEVER touches the web.

You should be making the paper wallets on an offline computer. Nothing prevents you from testing the private keys on a wallet like electrum, on that offline computer.

Presumably you'd be using something like Bitaddress a long way offline. Create your wallet and store everything. Then start another Bitaddress session and feed in the private key in the wallet details bit. It'll show you the same address and then you'll know you're set for life.

Presumably you'd be using something like Bitaddress a long way offline. Create your wallet and store everything. Then start another Bitaddress session and feed in the private key in the wallet details bit. It'll show you the same address and then you'll know you're set for life.

They work very well, but on it's lowest level, it's just two long strings of characters. Find a way to securely and safely store those two numbers in addition to paper wallets. Paper wallets do not work well in a washing machine, or a fire.

EDIT: To use paper wallets at all, you eventually have to know how to get BTC out. There are two main choices with software wallets. if you IMPORT the private key, it is available in both locations. If you SWEEP the key, it conclusively moves it. A good way to start is put a tiny bit in a paper wallet, then familiarize yourself with sweeping it to a software/hardware wallet. Sweep may be more secure than import, else you can leave several software wallets around with BTC. You need to always secure the software ones. When TX fees are low, flip it around a few times. Then you won't be stressed over moving large amounts someday.

Breaking 24777$ prediction game      FINAL LIST  
     
Gesnipp

MERRY XMAS TO Y'ALL     AND GOOD LUCK

Sorry for posting way off topic this morning, I was in panic mode. I know you guys are always on here, and I appreciate your help. Looks like I actually got my coins back now. (mind blown) I got on this morning to send a transaction, I was watching it on the blockchain, 2 hours later. A separate transaction appeared sending my remaining coins to unknown address. Which turns out, is one of my own hidden addresses. I know change can be sent back to hidden addresses, my understanding is it's always in the same Transaction ID though. This transaction shows on the blockchain with it's own ID but doesn't show in my wallet.

That's the first time I've ever seen a backdoor virus detected on this pc and I definitely did not turn defender off myself. Maybe that's just a coincidence and it was leading to draw the wrong conclusions. I dunno. I did a format and reinstall of windows 3 days ago because windows was reporting corrupt system files when trying to update. I've only installed programs I consider trustworthy since, so I'm really surprised to find a backdoor got on here. Anyway, think I'm going to take a nap when my blood pressure returns to normal.