How to create an offline wallet?

[ptk0693]

Hello everyone I am new to crytocurrency and I am interested in purchasing some for investment purposes. I recently heard about the incident with Dogewallet and heard some advice about creating an offline wallet where I can back up my coins on hard drives and disks. As for now I have created accounts for Cryptsy and Coinbase however I also want to create an offline wallet as well. Does anybody know an easy way to create an offline wallet? More specifically for currencies other than Bitcoin?

[robbcarpdm]

I am a newbie myself and looking for similar solution

Also, looking at a group buy have you found anything that is fair that is still open?

Thanks in advance

[DarkStar851]

Just download the corresponding client for whatever cryptocurrency you want to mine, that'll download the blockchain (in the case of DOGE it's not that big, but other currencies can be quite large), and your wallet data is stored by the program.
http://dogecoin.com/ < you can get the Dogecoin client here.

Once installed, just go to "Much Receive" (or whatever the equivalent is in some non-meme locale) and you should find an address waiting for you to receive payments on.

[lagomorph7]

To add to what DarkStar said, make sure to be careful with downloading wallets. A common scam is for someone to post a link to an alt coin wallet that contains malware that can steal your bitcoins/litecoins/etc. For an established alt coin, make sure to use the official wallet download. For new alt coins, download the wallet in a sand-boxed environment (vm, etc), or wait until the coin is better established.

Also, with an offline wallet, you'll want to encrypt it. Preferably, the encryption password should be generated and stored in a password safe (KeePass, etc). That safe should be backed up somewhere offsite (don't want to lose access to your wallet just because you lost your password safe). And, finally, that offline wallet should itself be backed up offsite.

Of course, how much of the above you actually need to do depends on the value of your coins. Only have a couple satoshi? Unnecessary. Have a couple thousand bitcoins? Then, the above is not enough. Context is important.