Many people are interested in storing their own bitcoins rather than using an online wallet, either for security reasons or on principle.
But it’s harder than it looks. Techniques such as offline key generation are great, but not bulletproof; sophisticated malware might use WiFi even if it’s disabled in the OS, or write keys to the hard drive for re-transmission later when the system is online. Hardware wallets are great too, but how certain are you that an undiscovered vulnerability isn’t being exploited to grab your private keys over that USB cable?
When you’re dealing with large sums of money, relatively small risks such as these may feel unacceptably large -- and these examples are just the tip of the iceberg.
We made Glacier to help people navigate around these risks. Glacier is a free open-source protocol that walks you through cold storage, step by step. It’s designed for people storing large amounts of bitcoin who are willing to invest some time and money for very high-security storage.
We’re happy to offer our beta release as a gift to the bitcoin community:
https://glacierprotocol.org