Forks and protecting your private key

[woinarsa]

I was wondering how people approach realising the value in the created forks (rather than just HODLing them)

My Bitcoin is in paper wallets and I never use those private keys for the forks until my bitcoin has been moved out of the paper wallet (due to lack of trust in the forks and keeping my private keys ... well private!). There is however a non-trivial cost in transaction fees in moving from one paper wallet to another.

Note: I prefer paper wallets to hardware wallets as I can store multiple copies for redundancy reasons.

With the many forks recently and to come it could prove costly using my current method.

What do you people think?       

[pooya87]

first thing to remember is that it depends on how much bitcoin you own. practically you should multiply your balance by the price of the forked coin and if it is higher than [bitcoin transaction fee + bitcoin withdrawal fee from exchange] then you should bother claiming them.

for example currently bitcoin transaction fees are lower than 50,000 satoshi so lets take that number. the withdrawal fee from Yobit (which has lots of these forked coins listed) is 150,000 satoshi. so you should earn more than 200,000 satoshi from the claim.

if price is 0.01BTC per fork coin, then you will need at least 0.2BTC
if price is 0.001BTC per fork coin, then you need at least 2BTC (ignoring trading fee of 0.2%)

with that said it is best to wait until a number of them come out so you can claim them all at once. and the right move as you said is to move your bitcoin first to a new wallet not a new address from the same wallet. because these days majority of wallets are deterministic which means your wallet contains a master key (or seed) which can generate all your current/in use or futuristic keys. importing the wallet into the new client or importing your seed means ALL your wallet is compromised. so it is best to create a new wallet with a new seed.

[HunterBTC]

It's better to secure Bitcoin's private key and password, or it can also double the key to anticipation if Bitcoin members forget their password or accidentally deleted.