massive cold storage of bitcoins?

[kerafym]

That is biggest problem of BitCoin, people don't look at it as a money to use it, but as a treasury to keep for rainy days.

Since bitcoin is deflationary they use it as a speculative tool to increasing their wealth in terms of fiat.

There is little way around this issue.

Which is ok. If the value keep going up, it might be better  used as a store of wealth rather than being money.

[Benjig]

There's another post on reddit today of someone who had 35 BTC stolen from "secure" wallets.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/295las/35_of_my_btc_gone_pc_not_compromised/

Certainly it seems like this guy knew what he was doing, but still somehow managed to get his BTC stolen....

I myself have taken all my bitcoins off of coinbase except for small amount. Except for a few donations, I haven't spent any this year.
I'm wondering, if investors put most of their bitcoins in cold storage (and subsequently, not use them for currency), what will be the result?

On one hand, they become more rare and they are held more tightly, which would seem to make them more valuable. On the other hand, they won't be used very much, which might mean they don't have as much value.
I'm not sure what to conclude. There are a lot of very smart people here and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

 

Definitely wasn't secure, just another good reminder not to use untrusted sites with rubbish entropy to generate wallets. Sad though, I feel for the guy. Armory Armory Armory...

Yeah i havent heard any history about a well secured wallet where the guy dint download anything from internet and still lost his bitcoins, most of the hacks are done by some trojan they downloaded or because they stored the btcs in an unsecure place.

[DannyElfman]

That is biggest problem of BitCoin, people don't look at it as a money to use it, but as a treasury to keep for rainy days.

Since bitcoin is deflationary they use it as a speculative tool to increasing their wealth in terms of fiat.

There is little way around this issue.

Which is ok. If the value keep going up, it might be better  used as a store of wealth rather than being money.

in order for the price of bitcoin to go up over the long term it will have to be used as some form of money

[piramida]

That is biggest problem of BitCoin, people don't look at it as a money to use it, but as a treasury to keep for rainy days.

Since bitcoin is deflationary they use it as a speculative tool to increasing their wealth in terms of fiat.

There is little way around this issue.

Which is ok. If the value keep going up, it might be better  used as a store of wealth rather than being money.

in order for the price of bitcoin to go up over the long term it will have to be used as some form of money

I guess you mix terms "money" and "currency" here. Just putting something in a cold storage knowing it will be still worth something tomorrow - is already using it as some form of money. The good, value-storing, money. It still could be used as a currency - for performing exchanges - but the amount of such exchanges has nothing to do with it's "price" going up or down longterm. It may very well be used only as better gold, as a convenient value-store and value-transfer only, and be converted into fiat for any purchase, and still have incredible valuation.

In fact, I think the future for bitcoin is being the backbone of wealth storage and money transfer; all the local purchases will be performed in local fiat (prices of all fiat money would be expressed in bitcoin and will only serve as a temporary physical off-blockchain representation). Any government could then print as much fiat as they want, but that would result in their fiat tanking against bitcoin quick.

[spazzdla]

Secure not even close to offline.  Not concerned.

[buzzlight]

Sorry for the late reply. Thanks for pointing in the right direction. Electrum seems ideal for my purposes!

[wachtwoord]

The vast majority of the gold storage is in cold storage (or at least believed to be, I'm looking at you Germany )

[EricTyle]

I use PiperWallet. 200$ machine. Bitaddress.org. Offline.

[DannyElfman]

Is bitaddress.org safe though??

Personally, I don't consider any mainstream computer-implemented random number generators to be secure.  That includes bitaddress.org's built in entropy source.  My solution is to mix in my own entropy, at about 10% - 15%.  What does that look like in practice?  I accept the private keys that are supposedly randomly generated, make a few of my own 'random' modifications, swapping out 5 - 10 characters, and then turn that new private key into an address.

And, it can help to double or triple check the address derivation was carried out correctly.  Feel free to import your custom private key into different pieces of software and make sure they all give the same result.

IIRC one of the devs had posted on here that the entropy of bitaddress was not truly random and it may not be a good idea to use their services, although it could have been regarding another bitcoin address generating site.

[piramida]

Is bitaddress.org safe though??

Personally, I don't consider any mainstream computer-implemented random number generators to be secure.  That includes bitaddress.org's built in entropy source.  My solution is to mix in my own entropy, at about 10% - 15%.  What does that look like in practice?  I accept the private keys that are supposedly randomly generated, make a few of my own 'random' modifications, swapping out 5 - 10 characters, and then turn that new private key into an address.

And, it can help to double or triple check the address derivation was carried out correctly.  Feel free to import your custom private key into different pieces of software and make sure they all give the same result.

IIRC one of the devs had posted on here that the entropy of bitaddress was not truly random and it may not be a good idea to use their services, although it could have been regarding another bitcoin address generating site.

no, you remember wrong. it was about brainwallet.org which used silly simplification in obtaining randomness ; bitaddress is fine.

[AdamSmith]

Some developers should implement a safe and easy to use wallet. If someone with experience encounter this type of problem, we can assume a non-geek will hesitate to use a currency that is not safe and not secure.

[dothebeats]

I don't have much bitcoins to store so I only keep it in my old android phone that I don't use to connect to the internet. I heard that many people have their coins stolen by using brainwallet.org and one user here in BTT have accused me of stealing his coins by telling other people that the brainwallet address was mine. So if you want to keep your coins safe and secure, don't use any services offering you "secure and safe wallets" that seems to be shady and not trusted by any other users.

[alexeft]

There's another post on reddit today of someone who had 35 BTC stolen from "secure" wallets.

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/295las/35_of_my_btc_gone_pc_not_compromised/

Certainly it seems like this guy knew what he was doing, but still somehow managed to get his BTC stolen....

I myself have taken all my bitcoins off of coinbase except for small amount. Except for a few donations, I haven't spent any this year.
I'm wondering, if investors put most of their bitcoins in cold storage (and subsequently, not use them for currency), what will be the result?

On one hand, they become more rare and they are held more tightly, which would seem to make them more valuable. On the other hand, they won't be used very much, which might mean they don't have as much value.
I'm not sure what to conclude. There are a lot of very smart people here and I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.

 

I don't buy this!

[scribbles]

That is biggest problem of BitCoin, people don't look at it as a money to use it, but as a treasury to keep for rainy days.

This false dichotomy is getting tiresome. It's not a choice between storing all your bitcoin away OR spending all of it. Just like with fiat, people have savings AND daily spending money. There is nothing wrong with having savings in bitcoin - the problem is not having enough places to spend bitcoin on a daily basis. I have my cold storage that I won't touch (savings) and I have a wallet on my phone with small amounts that I spend every chance I get.

Stop blaming people for holding their savings, which is wise, and put energy into getting more vendors to accept bitcoin, therefore increasing daily transactions in bitcoin.

[trader001]

The vast majority of the gold storage is in cold storage (or at least believed to be, I'm looking at you Germany )

Gold is the reserve currency of the past. It could be used again for this purpose if bitcoin didn't take over.