Another protocol for you to follow, my suggestion or recommendation, is to not simply store in cold storage and forget about it for 10 years, unless you are incapacitated or unconscious, is to simply look up and research the current events and keep updated.
The core website, any of the major bitcoin / crypto news websites. To keep up with news about any soft forks, hard forks, new address formats, ... I mean, it would be a good idea to switch from legacy to nested segwit, or skip directly to native segwit... and in the future there might be a new format for taproot and schnorr as that is being proposed right now.
Once a year, review your coins, and study how to transfer them to a new address safely.
Ideally, you would be contributing to your stash often enough that you can include this as part of your strategy for long term holding.
There are people out there who buy for their retirement every month. Once a year isn't too much huh?
This is in addition to doing anything to make sure the wallets are indeed cold storage, the computers or hardware you use have an air gap and all the other stuff mentioned by everyone else.
Always good knowledge coming from you, if at least one noob will start dealing with bitcoin the right way after your post, you're to be thanked!
Buy, forget and store securely your bitcoin has long proven to be the most effective wealth advice for new bitcoin holders. I wish I'd have been given that advice in 2010
Thank you, much appreciated for the kind words.
I don't think too many OG who got any advice in 2010 or 2011 have kept their coins if they got any back then. I would be safely retired by now if I had kept any coins I got back then, or invested in some random site and kept the profits instead of spending them. But some of us have to buy that first pizza, or that miner, or that sock, or test it out on some platform ... And some of us actually lived on bitcoin earnings ...
My current best long term storage for bitcoin involves using Electrum and making backups of the seeds and keeping it all offline and cold. If I ever get around to having more than a few million dollars worth, it will all be migrated to multi-sig (still using Electrum) and several separate physical devices.
Version 22 of Core wallet came out recently, but I would wait some time before upgrading the main node. If you have back up nodes or wallets for testing purposes, you can probably upgrade that immediately and see for yourself if all works okay.