HOWTO: create a 100% secure wallet

[Jokah]

Surely if bitcoin is to succeed then this process has to be made simpler at some point.

I'm certainly not complaing at the OP as it is a well written guide on how to secure your wallet at this current time. But when compared to how easy it is for the average person to safely store cash or gold for example securing your bitcoins safely is a process that very few people will be able to do. I would say most people wouldn't know how to do a simple task like change there screen resolution on a computer let alone carry out a process like this.

I have a hard enough time explaining bitcoin to people as it is. If I carried on to explain what needs to be done to keep your bitcoins safe they'd proabaly be put off bitcoins before I finished one sentence.

[cypherdoc]

In case anyone here is interested in an all-in-one solution (this request came up frequently in the newbie discussion), I created a poll to see if there is any interest in having something like a simple, grandma-friendly tutorial and a prepackaged operating system, which would come in the form of a bitcoin-only USB-stick that allows safe transfers without the need of any technical affinity.

Head over there if you want to express your opinion about this: Poll for an easy security HOWTO (+ operating system)

i need clarification.  while in Ubuntu live cd, should we download the entire block chain in the client and then send btc from another wallet to the receiving address, and then wait for confirmation before closing the client and then copying wallet.dat to a usb stick?

or do u advocate just closing the client after obtaining the receiving address and then copying it to a usb stick before getting confirmation of the transfer of btc to the new receiving address?

the former would just give more confidence that what ur doing is gonna work over the long term since you won't be able to view any balances from here on forward w/o compromising security.