How safe is a cold wallet compared to dedicated machine wallet?

[FxFocus]

I have a raspberry pi set up as cold wallet paired with a watch only wallet on my online windows machine. I know nothing of the inner workings of viruses, trojans or worms, etc. that could conceivably compromise my wallet but it occurs to me that the weakness of the system is the method of passing information between devices via a memory stick. Surely this entails a risk of the memory stick becoming infected while attached to the online device.

I appreciate this risk may be small but then I wonder how greater might be the risk if I simply dedicated a machine to an electrum hot wallet and this machine was only powered up and online for as long as it took to complete transactions?

If the difference in risk is not great then it would be nice to avoid the inconvenience of switching a memory stick between two machines.

[shorena]

So you are asking which is less likely to get infected?

[a] RasPi (cold storrage) & Win7/8 (Hot storrage) vs. [c]* RasPi (cold) & Dedicated (Linux) machine with Electrum (Hot)

Since most viruses or trojans nowadays rely on userinteraction [c] is more secure. Yes, even Windows is on a securitylevel that makes an infection without interaction from the user very unlikely.

If you are willing to make the sacrifice in money (need an extra machine) and comfort (need to boot that extra machine everytime you want to spend money) aswell as time (need to setup that extra machine) [c] is the way to go. I assume here that you have a reasonable amount to protect. IMHO its overkill for 1 btc, unless you enjoy setting up systems


* I wanted to use [a] and

Code:

[b]

but since thats short for bold, its c now.

[Abdussamad]

I appreciate this risk may be small but then I wonder how greater might be the risk if I simply dedicated a machine to an electrum hot wallet and this machine was only powered up and online for as long as it took to complete transactions?

An occasionally online machine I suppose it's ok. The problem is how to transfer addresses of receipients from the win machine to the wallet machine? Emailing it or using a USB stick means both machines are equally exposed. So I would do it using the converter on brainwallet.org. It can convert an address into poetry that you can quickly jot down. Then open up that page on the wallet machine and reverse the process: poetry > b58check.