Beirut explosion - Lesson to learn from this.

[Kakmakr]

People can quickly become complacent to think that their single location storage of their Bitcoin hoard would be enough. We all saw how 300 000 people have lost their houses in as little as a few seconds.

The Beirut explosion should be a wake-up call to all of us, to store your Paper wallets and cold wallets in more than one geographical location. A national disaster or a accident like this might wipe out your house and if you used that as your primary hiding place, you would lose more than your house.

After a disaster like this, bulldozers are brought in and only the foundations might be left after they are done. (So hiding it in a safe or a wall or the roof is a bad idea.)

Make sure you have several copies of your Paper wallets/Private keys and store them in separate locations. You might not even be at home when a disaster like this happens and when you return, the authorities might stop you from entering the devastated area. (due to instability of structures or chemical/gas leaks.) So you will not have a opportunity to retrieve your stash. 

Wake up and act now... before it is too late. 

[Ucy]

In my opinion, one of the safest, easiest, cheapest, solid DIY method to store in different locations is almost free, but people will probably not like it because it not that cool. The best things tend to be free and widely available but look too ordinary/common... so people go for the cool, complicated, hard-to-make, not-so-secure ones, and they really trust and like them.

[Upgrade00]

This is the reality, such events cannot be prepared for and as such one would have to have a contingency plan. When setting up locations such as these which isn't your primary place of residence, security has to be a priority as while a disaster could lead to the loss of your funds, some other sort could expose your assets to theft.
To prevent this, you could set up a modified seed phrase on the paper wallet stored in the other locations so the bulk of your funds would only be accessible by you.

[Argoo]

According to the information, the explosion in Beirut was due to a violation of fire safety during welding in a place where 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate had been stored for years, and firecrackers were still laid on top, which caught fire during this work until all this detonated. Of course, such cases of negligence can still occur.
Yes, unfortunately, this once again confirms how fragile the world of high technology is. Now, perhaps, many will think that the protective measures they have taken to safeguard data on wallets with cryptocurrency are clearly not enough.

[mk4]

I actually like Casa's multisig[1] solution for this. It's just so simple but yet so good in my opinion. If anyone here can afford the monthly payment for their service, I suggest taking a look at it. I've been ignoring it a lot in the past even if Jameson Lopp was promoting it kinda frequently, but I recently just said screw it and took a look at it.

[1] https://docs.keys.casa/wealth-security-protocol/

[The Sceptical Chymist]

There's never going to be 100% safety when storing your private keys, or with anything else for that matter.  I saw the video of the Beirut blast, and you'd have to have your HW wallet or flash drive or piece of paper with your seed words on it buried pretty deep if you were storing any of those things near the blast zone--and even then, what's to keep rescue workers or the cleanup crews from stumbling across your stash before you do?

This is definitely one of the disadvantages of crypto, that you truly own your own money.  There's not a bank that's insuring it, and it's not stored on some corporation's server like stocks and other digital investments are.  If your private keys get blown up or lost or stolen, you're screwed. 

As an aside, I can't believe there were only around 100 casualties in that blast.  It looked like it would have killed a lot more people than that, though I don't know how dense the population was in that particular area at the time.  Scary stuff.

[Tipstar]

There are always risks. On such degree of explosion, a safely kept paper might survive but a human won't. If the sum is large enough or is a corporate holding, it would be wise to let multiple people have the access to the wallet just in case. For personal holdings, it would be okay to let your wife and children know about it.

[Wenbing]

Don't you believe that having soft wallet or virtual wallet will be better on the following grounds;
1. Mobility
2. Readily Availability
3. Portability

Due to the above, you don't have to worry of disaster such as explosion of this kind. I think the only challenge is hackers, that is why we use wallets that are proven to be secured.

well, this is my own opinion. I think this is a way forward and one of the approach to avoid a total loss of ones digital assets.

[joinfree]

It's so sad what happened to the people of Beirut but I have always had it in mind to store backups of my files in other places especially in my relative's house...just that they will not be in plain words but they would have some form of coding where i am going to be the only one to understand it.

[LoyceV]

The Beirut explosion should be a wake-up call to all of us, to store your Paper wallets and cold wallets in more than one geographical location. A national disaster or a accident like this might wipe out your house and if you used that as your primary hiding place, you would lose more than your house.

Storing your crypto in multiple locations increases the risk of someone else gaining access to it. From what I've seen, the number of people who lost their crypto to theft is many times larger than the people who lost their crypto to large disasters.

This is definitely one of the disadvantages of crypto, that you truly own your own money.

It's always a trade off between the risk of losing access yourself, and someone else gaining access. I've never found a solution that fully satisfies me.

[lionheart78]

The Beirut explosion should be a wake-up call to all of us, to store your Paper wallets and cold wallets in more than one geographical location. A national disaster or a accident like this might wipe out your house and if you used that as your primary hiding place, you would lose more than your house.

After a disaster like this, bulldozers are brought in and only the foundations might be left after they are done. (So hiding it in a safe or a wall or the roof is a bad idea.)

I believe hiding it beneath the ground will suffice. We must make sure that it is waterproofed, sealed, or laminated to prevent it from decay.  I also agree that we should keep parts of our private key in different places and should have several digital backed up stored in safe places.

[wxa7115]

People can quickly become complacent to think that their single location storage of their Bitcoin hoard would be enough. We all saw how 300 000 people have lost their houses in as little as a few seconds.

The Beirut explosion should be a wake-up call to all of us, to store your Paper wallets and cold wallets in more than one geographical location. A national disaster or a accident like this might wipe out your house and if you used that as your primary hiding place, you would lose more than your house.

After a disaster like this, bulldozers are brought in and only the foundations might be left after they are done. (So hiding it in a safe or a wall or the roof is a bad idea.)

Make sure you have several copies of your Paper wallets/Private keys and store them in separate locations. You might not even be at home when a disaster like this happens and when you return, the authorities might stop you from entering the devastated area. (due to instability of structures or chemical/gas leaks.) So you will not have a opportunity to retrieve your stash. 

Wake up and act now... before it is too late. 

Everything you say is true but there is no perfect solution for this, the more backups you have of your data the bigger the chances someone finds out about your holdings and they get stolen, and even if you were to encrypt the file with your seed words or private keys now the point of failure becomes the device where you are storing the necessary software to decrypt those keys.

You could choose to commit your seed words to memory, something that sounds harder than it is, but even that is not a perfect solution as obviously you can forget them naturally or suffer an accident that makes your coins impossible to recover as well.

So in my opinion people should take enough measures to protect their coins from the most common occurrences and accept the fact that they could lose their coins to a one in a million event like this explosion.

[Sanugarid]

This is definitely one of the disadvantages of crypto, that you truly own your own money.  There's not a bank that's insuring it, and it's not stored on some corporation's server like stocks and other digital investments are.  If your private keys get blown up or lost or stolen, you're screwed. 

It is also the bad thing that I see with crypto, with decentralization it's only you who make the transfer of money, anything that could happen wrong will be your responsibility. Same with owning a pretty safe, hardware wallet or any cold storage you can never be too comfortable with your surrounding coz any thing  can happen at any time just like what we have seen in Lebanon. No one expect that to happen, no one was really prepared for that to happen, and we can't get back the lives of the people that died to the incident.

As an aside, I can't believe there were only around 100 casualties in that blast.  It looked like it would have killed a lot more people than that, though I don't know how dense the population was in that particular area at the time.  Scary stuff.

Probably because of the community quarantine, they limit the personnel on that area besides it was in the pier so I guess there's only a few people there but the blast has a wide circumference, luckily the casualty is still small, thanks God.

[target]

It's part of the risk I guess, you wouldn't really think there will be an explosion to where you hide your paperwallet.  It's a double tragedy, you lose your coins and lose a home.

Lucky for those who own lots of properties like having a place in the city and having a copy of your paperwallet hidden on your hometown address Assuming you hide it well without someone identifying it contains a private key.

[BrewMaster]

the problem with a disaster of this magnitude and severity is that it wipes the person alongside their paper wallets! so there would not be anybody left to claim the coins from that paper wallet anyways assuming it is following the security recommendations and encrypting the paper wallet. otherwise without encryption the risk of having such a secondary backup in another location is higher in my opinion than not having it at all.

[carlisle1]

It's part of the risk I guess, you wouldn't really think there will be an explosion to where you hide your paperwallet.  It's a double tragedy, you lose your coins and lose a home.

And those who died, they also lose their lives, it's  a tragedy that cause by a mistake hiding a high explosive device in the very heart

of populated city. It's sadden the fact that people around that place have no ideas in whatever hits them.

Lucky for those who own lots of properties like having a place in the city and having a copy of your paperwallet hidden on your hometown address Assuming you hide it well without someone identifying it contains a private key.

The wise thing to do. If you have different properties, you can hide your  paper wallet inside a safe box or place from your both your
places, making sure that you'll be able to keep it in case there's accidents like this or more al like.

[FlightyPouch]

I think this also proves that whatever you wanted to do, you can't actually take care of something at 100%. There will always be a percentages of it that would make you lose anything including your bitcoins. Taking care is something but accidents are unexpected.

[Bitcoin_bullish]

I'm really saddened by what happened and while mistakes can happen I can't justify such a horrible mistake as having such a huge amount of explosive material next to a populated area. I am also sad that there are people that do not care at all about events as these and are just being cynical and care only for their own fortune.
I would have expected to point out how these people need help right now and how they've seen half their city devastated and perhaps thousands of lives lost.

About your Bitcoin keys and how your only reaction on this matter is that our keys are not safe in our home, I don't have much to say. There is no reason for an event similar to a nuclear assault to happen to make you understand how to safely store them. There can be thousands of events that can destroy your keys and backups are a solution.

Of course, you never store your backup in the same spot. Another solution that was already mentioned but not in the weird custodial service that was promoted, is a multi-sig wallet which can let you use two out of three, two out of four or any combination of private keys.

You do not need to pay for multi-sig wallets and I do not recommend custodial services.

[Kakmakr]

The Beirut explosion should be a wake-up call to all of us, to store your Paper wallets and cold wallets in more than one geographical location. A national disaster or a accident like this might wipe out your house and if you used that as your primary hiding place, you would lose more than your house.

Storing your crypto in multiple locations increases the risk of someone else gaining access to it. From what I've seen, the number of people who lost their crypto to theft is many times larger than the people who lost their crypto to large disasters.

This is definitely one of the disadvantages of crypto, that you truly own your own money.

It's always a trade off between the risk of losing access yourself, and someone else gaining access. I've never found a solution that fully satisfies me.

Not if you know what you are doing.    I store my "Private Keys" in a way that only myself would reconstruct it.. if needed. I left instructions and also directions to the locations of my stash for the people I leave behind. (The people I trusted with handing over the instructions, cannot do anything with it, because only my love ones knows how to decipher it from clues I left behind.)

Even someone finding it, will not know how to use it... because it is not recognizable as Private keys.    There are ways to implement this that are safe and secure and it makes it possible to store it in several different locations without uninformed people capable of knowing what it is.  

[MainIbem]

The blast, as I saw on FB was a devastation of the kind of Hiroshima. Quite pathetic that so many lives are lost.

On the matter of security of wallet keys, it is better imagined than experienced. There are so many disasters that could cause same devastating loss; flood, fire, earth quakes etc.

I recall my teacher giving an example of a firm that never thought the twin towers of World Trade Center (WTC) will come down the same day, so he rented offices in both buildings. One of the offices in one of the building was used purely as a safe keep for important documents. As it is today, that proved to be a faulty safe. Cloud storage is the best. Use any of the cloud storage. Use a passworded  word document.