How do you keep your bitcoins?

[Playboi]

I have all my coins in on an online trading site (paxful) (low volume)

I plan on making a large investment very soon, and want to safely store all of my coins
I.E I basically want to drop a couple thousand, and keep them in the safest possible way, where I can revisit them in 5-10 years or so and reap the benefits, or cry about the loss.

What is the best way to do this, and what's the best way of ensuring a backup?

How do you currently store your coins

thanks in advance for any inputs

[aardvark15]

I would not trust an online storage site or an exchange with a large amount of money. I would only put money on an exchange for trading and I would keep some stored separately in a secure location. So the question is what is a secure location? Most people would say an offline paper wallet is the most secure. If you know that no one has the private key, then that probably is the most secure. You would need to make sure you keep the wallet address and private key where you can get to them but they are secure like in a safe deposit box or a safe.  As long as you do that, you should be fine.

Then the problem is what happens if you die and you want a beneficiary to have access to the coins. For this situation, you may need to leave instructions on what to do with the keys in a will or in the safe. I have heard of people keeping the public and private keys on a thumb drive, but I have heard that the data may not last forever on those, so a paper wallet is probably best.

[philiveyjr]

I keep my bitcoins on a offline wallet which I keep just to store, otherwise I have my bitcoins on localbitcoins(low volume) in case i'm outside and need some money in my bank account. It works very well for me and I'm very happy with it as of now.

[Tyrantt]

currently using blockchain.info wallet, since I don't trade with huge amounts of bitcoin and I'm keeping it safe as much as I can and also, as soon as I recieve the bitcoin, I trade it asap for fiat so I barely have anything on my wallet right now.

[shinratensei_]

I'd like to know what the kind of your coin because every coin has a different method to keep them in the cold storage. But Use the hardware wallet if you are trying to hold bitcoin for some years later. Or the SPV wallet on your desktop to altcoin.

[uneng]

I use an online wallet service also. It's risk, but there is no problem for me because I don't have much money.
As you want to make a large investment, I think you should migrate to another service like a cold wallet. However, I can't guarantee you if doing this your money will be full safe. And don't wait 5-10 years to visit again, bitcoin price can increase, but can drop also, nobody knows.

[asdalani]

I have Bitcoin placed in a huge amount of places online and I am not sure how much I have offline.
Bitcoin isn't really that important to me so there isn't any point of tracking it down when the price is only $1,034.9.

If the price was maybe $1,000,000,000 per coin then maybe I would try to look for them.

[xuan87]

For this kind of case, i suggest to used off line wallet don't used online wallet because you are not going to supervise your wallet for a long time and if it is possible spread your money into a different wallets, in that way you decrease the chance of losing your money all at once, the most important is to keep your private key safe and remember to save it, because you are going to invest the coin for a long time

[LTU_btc]

I keep my bitcoins divided into few online wallets. I know it's not safest place to keep bitcoins, especially if wallet don't gives your private keys, but I don't want to keep bitcoins on desktop wallet because I'm afraid to catch virus, which can steal my coins. I also keep some bitcoins in few exchanges for trading. But it's only small amount, keeping all bitcoins on exchanges is not recommended. I think safest place to keep bitcoins is hardware wallet like Trezor, but it costs quite expensive.

[LittleBitFunny]

If you're really talking about having that much Bitcoin, I would suggest having a look at a hardware wallet.  These are essentially separate mini-computers which cannot be infected with malware as they do not transfer private keys with other computers to transfer.  I don't have that much of an understanding since I don't have enough Bitcoin to bother, but you could read up on TREZOR, which I know is a pretty prominent one.  If you're not too concerned about malware you could have an offline wallet which would be 99.999% safe anyway.  Definitely wouldn't keep them online though because once you're hacked you're screwed.

[Skarner21]

I suggest to move your bitcoin into electrum wallet dont stay your coins in paxful..
For safety spread your bitcoin into electrum wallet or if you can use bitcoin-qt use it also to save your bitcoin in your computer so that you will be safe..
But honestly never experience any problem with electrum.. so could be safe..

[asdalani]

I suggest to move your bitcoin into electrum wallet dont stay your coins in paxful..
For safety spread your bitcoin into electrum wallet or if you can use bitcoin-qt use it also to save your bitcoin in your computer so that you will be safe..
But honestly never experience any problem with electrum.. so could be safe..

Also keep a backup version of the wallet.dat and a password for your safety and then you should be pretty much good. The one thing people don't do as much on here is keep an encrypted backup file, just do that and you will have better memories.

[Vaskiy]

Op has the plan to save a the bitcoins for more than 5 years. In between he's not gonna use it, so its better to store it in a hardware wallet and keep it secure. For added security have the backup as well keep the public key secretly.

[crackhawk]

keeping bitcoin at paper wallet is best place, but for me building rig mining is more interesting, i can get money everyday and ofcourse i can sell my hardware as gamer rig too, if not profitable anymore

[warwar]

I would not trust an online storage site or an exchange with a large amount of money. I would only put money on an exchange for trading and I would keep some stored separately in a secure location. So the question is what is a secure location? Most people would say an offline paper wallet is the most secure. If you know that no one has the private key, then that probably is the most secure. You would need to make sure you keep the wallet address and private key where you can get to them but they are secure like in a safe deposit box or a safe.  As long as you do that, you should be fine.

Then the problem is what happens if you die and you want a beneficiary to have access to the coins. For this situation, you may need to leave instructions on what to do with the keys in a will or in the safe. I have heard of people keeping the public and private keys on a thumb drive, but I have heard that the data may not last forever on those, so a paper wallet is probably best.

If you would invest a pretty big amount then this advice using a paper wallet in your own computer never ever trust an online wallet because even how secure it is there still a chance of being hijacked by people who have interest stealing your money in to your wallet.

[ar9]

Only answer = hardware wallet.

Research them and pick one.  Hard to go wrong.

[hardtime]

I wouldn't fully trust putting all of the bitcoins I own into Paxful as that's not the most secure place to leave them in anyway. I personally like the online wallet called BitGo probably because you have control over your private key, 2FA is nice on it, and you can generate as many address to receive as you want and all the old ones work.

BitGo is typically used by the bigger Bitcoin companies in order for them to store their hotwallet coins / customers coins. I would say it's the best option if you're looking for web wallet.

If you don't need to move the coins for a good amount of time you could use a paper wallet which is pretty simple to make.

[MicroGuy]

How do you currently store your coins

Nowadays, they can be safely stored for days or weeks just by spending them.

[Zadicar]

How do you currently store your coins

Nowadays, they can be safely stored for days or weeks just by spending them.

He just mentioned that he would keep those bitcoins and speaking of spending then it would be the easiest way as we all know earning would be hard but spending them would be very easy. There are lots of wallet its either online or offline.

[gandame]

I kept my bitcoins at online wallet that I have, but temporarily within a week and I will cash out after. When I have the cash fiat in hand I would love to store it in my saving account at the bank for important and emergency purposes and the remaining btc balance, I’ve use it for loading my mobile phone number for consumption