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September 13, 2017, 05:21:23 PM |
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There are 2 types of risk to consider when managing your bitcoin (or any other crypto)
1. Having a 3rd party gain access to your keys. Any such 3rd party can spend your coins and almost certainly will do so eventually. So you need to be confident your keys are securely stored.
2. Losing access to your keys. A lost key has the same impact as a stolen key. You don't have access to the funds and it's impossible that you will be able to spend the coins unless you find the keys. In the vast majority of use cases this is the larger risk of the 2. There are literally billions of dollars of dead coins in the bitcoin blockchain because the original owner lost the keys through mishap or carelessness.
Managing type 1 is a well understood security problem, and equivalent to the same problem people have addressed with money since the idea was created.
Type 2 is a different beast, and managing it well can quickly lead you to storing your keys in a way that exposes you to additional risk of type 1. Before you commit to a hardware wallet, I suggest you research why flash memory isn't used as an archival storage medium.
{Brief aside, the Winklevoss twins boasted their coins were secure from hackers because they held them on multiple flash drives stored in vaults. I still wonder if that claim is true, and if they are truly that dumb.}
Bitaddress.org is the solution you are looking for. Paper wallets are your friend, and once you manage the risks related to creating and printing the wallet, your problem looks identical to a man trying to protect his cash.
Note that bitcoin and litecoin are the only coins I know of that have convenient methods to generate paper wallets. To me, this is a clear sign that the developers of other coins haven't done any clear thinking about value preservation for their users.
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