What Is The Best Way To Store Your Bitcoins Offline?

[Emoclaw]

2) Instead of Bitcoin core, I will use Electrum on this offline laptop and do the same thing as above. The problem here, is can I trust Electrum? and also I will be using an old version of electrum 1.9.8, so is it to use this old version?

electrum is a lot better than bitcoin core (only interms of size since its super lightweight ). I have been using electrum for quite a long time and I am satisfied with it. I have never had any problems with electrum so yeah you can trust electrum.

That's the problem. You need to "trust" Electrum. Or actually, you need to trust the server nodes it's connecting to.
You don't have to do that if you use Bitcoin Core, which provides complete trustlessness, a fundamental advantage of Bitcoin.

[aanbudi]

Thank you for the tutorial you created for us Bitcoin users. However I prefer to convert my Bitcoin into local currency and save it in Offline Bank. This is obviously safer and I only need to wear it when needed.

[whitemacna]

You should not use an outdated version of Electrum. You will have problems sending and fee estimates will be too low. Newest is 2.8.3 at Electrum.org. Electrum explains how to use two computers (one always offline) for cold storage here. Almost no one bothers with this setup anymore since hardware wallets are more secure and inexpensive. Get a hardware wallet.I agree. These are your best bet to guard against any attack you don't want. Having hardware wallets don't share what they have inside. So even if you use them on a virus infested computer you have, it will still store your coins safely.

[BillCoin]

You should not use an outdated version of Electrum. You will have problems sending and fee estimates will be too low. Newest is 2.8.3 at Electrum.org. Electrum explains how to use two computers (one always offline) for cold storage here. Almost no one bothers with this setup anymore since hardware wallets are more secure and inexpensive. Get a hardware wallet.I agree. These are your best bet to guard against any attack you don't want. Having hardware wallets don't share what they have inside. So even if you use them on a virus infested computer you have, it will still store your coins safely.

Usually when you use electrum for a cold wallet you don't actually use it as a wallet, you use it to store the wallet's seed and private keys, you can later load the wallet on a newly version of electrum.
The reason you shouldn't use elctrum is that below version 3.1 there is a flow that may result you to lose your funds once you want to spend it, there is still no risk if you just use electrum for storing the private keys and not for redeeming the outputs later.

[krishnaverma]

I will make sure to update this post using your suggestions that you post here. I want to make sure that this post is a reference to all new bitcoin users who want the best way to secure their new bitcoins.

I've made some big profits recently trading/flipping coins and i want to cash out and convert this profit to bitcoin, but I'm not sure how to store the new bitcoins safely.

I have some ideas about securing my bitcoins, but I'm not sure if they are good enough. I'm only interested in ways to store my bitcoins securely so if it even means that I will not be able to spend them easily, that's fine because I'm planning to keep them in cold store for a very long time, since I'm buy nature a bitcoin HODLer.

I have an old laptop that I'm no longer using, so it's okay to use it for just Bitcoin. I don't want to use a hardware wallet like trezor or other similar wallets.

1) Download the Bitcoin core wallet on my old laptop and create a lot of bitcoin addresses, back-up the wallet into multiple CDs, copy those addresses on a USB stick and transfer them to my Desktop computer that has an internet connection. This way I'm able to fund those Bitcoin addresses without having the private keys or the wallet.dat file on an online computer.

Note that I won't be able to let the computer to fully sync with the network, so is it safe to create multiple Bitcoin address this way even if it the Bitcoin-core hasn't fully Synced yet? Also is it safe to use old versions of Bitcoin-core like version 0.11.1 ?

2) Instead of Bitcoin core, I will use Electrum on this offline laptop and do the same thing as above. The problem here, is can I trust Electrum? and also I will be using an old version of electrum 1.9.8, so is it to use this old version?

3) Download a paper wallet script and use it to generate multiple address, store these addresses and their private keys in multiple CDs and copy the addresses to a USB stick to transfer the addresses to my desktop computer so I can send my earned bitcoins there. My question is, which paper wallet script should I use and can I really trust it?


I will update this post to make sure that contains all information for anyone who's wondering about securing his bitcoins offline.

You are already taking good number of precautions and thus need not worry. I do not invest much in bitcoins and thus I just keep it in multiple exchanges to remain safe. Storing it offline is a requirement for people who are investing huge amount in crypto