Am I a genious??

[Dargo]

so its not worth getting a blu-ray writer then?

So even like $1,000-$3,000 bitcoins would fit on just one DVD?

Blu-ray? DVD?
You could store all the bitcoins that will ever exist on a single CD.

For that matter, if you could find a drive for it, you could store all the bitcoins that will ever exist on a single 5.25 inch single sided 360 KB floppy disk.

If you have a pencil and a piece of paper, and you can manage to write 50 letters and numbers without making a mistake, you could store all the bitcoins that will ever exist with that tiny piece of paper.

Um no.  The OP idea was silly but that doesn't make your statements any less implausible.

There are currently 643,808 discrete non-zero addresses in the blockchain.  At a minimum you would need 157.18 MB of storage.

I took him to mean that you could, in principle, and after all coins get generated, send all the coins to a single address. Then you could "store" all the coins with that single address/key pair, which is something you could write on a small piece of paper.

[Papina]

so whats the best non-digital way to store your bitcoins? something you can put in a safe, but not rely on a usb or whatever

[John (John K.)]

so whats the best non-digital way to store your bitcoins? something you can put in a safe, but not rely on a usb or whatever

Paper wallets - print the privatekeys of the address containing your savings, and keep that in the safe.

[Kluge]

so whats the best non-digital way to store your bitcoins? something you can put in a safe, but not rely on a usb or whatever

Paper wallets - print the privatekeys of the address containing your savings, and keep that in the safe.

Don't forget to encrypt it! Maybe switch "j" and "K" or something?

[Fuckbuddies]

Burn it into your brain and hope you don't get dementia

[John (John K.)]

so whats the best non-digital way to store your bitcoins? something you can put in a safe, but not rely on a usb or whatever

Paper wallets - print the privatekeys of the address containing your savings, and keep that in the safe.

Don't forget to encrypt it! Maybe switch "j" and "K" or something?

Encrypt it with GPG and print the resulting plaintext out.

[organofcorti]

STORE BITCOINS ON BLURAY?!?!?! 

STORE BITCOINS ON VCR?!?!?! 

[Dargo]

STORE BITCOINS ON BLURAY?!?!?! 

STORE BITCOINS ON VCR?!?!?! 

lol, yes, or even Betamax - that would make it really hard for anyone to read your wallet.

[DannyHamilton]

Um no.  The OP idea was silly but that doesn't make your statements any less implausible.

There are currently 643,808 discrete non-zero addresses in the blockchain.  At a minimum you would need 157.18 MB of storage.

Neither the jbs89 nor I never said anything about trying to store the addresses of all the people he might ever want to send bitcoins to.  We were just discussing how much he would require to store the bitcoins that he owns.  If he happened to own all 21,000,000 bitcoins, he could store them exactly as I described by sending them all to a single address that he owns and then storing that single address.

[Kazimir]

STORE BITCOINS ON BLURAY?!?!?! 

Sometimes, people post stuff that make me wonder... Why for F*CK's sake would you ever want to store bitcoins (or anything for that matter) on a friggin' bluray (as opposed to harddisk, USB stick, online backups, etc)

[Gabi]

OP are you speaking about wallet.dat or the blockchain? Very different things!

so whats the best non-digital way to store your bitcoins? something you can put in a safe, but not rely on a usb or whatever

Your bitcoins are related to your private keys wich is large just some bits. You can just print it on paper.

[Gabi]

It might be interesting if you could store the blockchain and wallet.dat on a rewritable bluray disc instead of your hard drive. Then you could simply use bitcoin from any device that accepts bluray disks and bitcoin.

Exactly my thinking...

Hard Drives fail and burn out.. but if you keep a disc in a nice sleeve it will last forever.

That way it would also be alot easier to physically store your bitcoins.. rather than a decaying thumb drive; a stack of blurays!

Its my opinion that any online wallet or computer wallet is at a huge risk and you would only use those as a buffer between your bitcoin use and bitcoin storage

No. A normal disc WON'T LAST FOREVER. The blu-ray you make will be useless and unreadable in dunno, 5-10 years (moar liek 5 than 10...)

So if you put your wallet.dat on a bluray or a dvd and then 10 years later you want to get it... good luck.

[casascius]

If you have a pencil and a piece of paper, and you can manage to write 50 letters and numbers without making a mistake, you could store all the bitcoins that will ever exist with that tiny piece of paper.

You could even do it in as few as 30 characters, since that's what's on a piece of paper embedded in each Casascius Coin.

Someone just cashed in a 1000 BTC gold-plated bar yesterday.  The bitcoins were on a tiny piece of paper the size of the little circles you shake out of a hole punch.  Just the thought of sending $7000+ to/from a tiny piece of paper is worthy of a double-take.  It goes from being a scrap to worth several hundred times its weight in gold in a mere instant.

[k]

One of these would probably be a better idea
http://www.kurzweilai.net/a-million-year-hard-disk

[exotime]

Every media type degrades. Every cloud service will eventually close or fail or be compromised. Trust no one.

Make many many copies that only you can access. Keep updating them as time progresses, to fight degradation of the medium. All you need to store on each medium is your 50-byte private key.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Every media type degrades. Every cloud service will eventually close or fail or be compromised. Trust no one.

Make many many copies that only you can access. Keep updating them as time progresses, to fight degradation of the medium. All you need to store on each medium is your 50-byte private key.

Carve your private key (or deterministic wallet seed) into a block of solid tungsten.

Fun with metals fun fact of the day:
Tungsten's melting point (>6000 F) is higher than the peak temp of a structure fire (<3500 F).

[Cablez]

I keep the only important key in my head................with a small backup offline just in case.

[casascius]

I keep the only important key in my head................with a small backup offline just in case.

Your key is vulnerable to rubber hose cryptanalysis.

I don't have a brainwallet, but if I did, I wouldn't advertise it!

I use redundant safety deposit boxes for maximum security, one of which is inconveniently far from me.  I still want them findable by my family if I die but not usable by snooping eyes, so it's simple: a paper wallet page simply cut in n sections (I made some paper wallets without QR codes), and each section has 1/n of the private keys (i.e. if n=2, then the page is literally cut in half down the middle, so no key is complete without both halves).  This way, I can worry less about someone kicking in my door and holding a knife to my throat and saying "give me the f'n bitcoins".  I can still fund the addresses at any time, I just can't spend without doing some driving.

[DeathAndTaxes]

I keep the only important key in my head................with a small backup offline just in case.

Your key is vulnerable to rubber hose cryptanalysis.

I don't have a brainwallet, but if I did, I wouldn't advertise it!

I use redundant safety deposit boxes for maximum security, one of which is inconveniently far from me.  I still want them findable by my family if I die but not usable by snooping eyes, so it's simple: a paper wallet page simply cut in n sections (I made some paper wallets without QR codes), and each section has 1/n of the private keys (i.e. if n=2, then the page is literally cut in half down the middle).  This way, I can worry less about someone kicking in my door and holding a knife to my throat and saying "give me the f'n bitcoins".  I can still fund the addresses at any time, I just can't spend without doing some driving.

There are also cryptographic functions you can use to create redundancy.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_cryptosystem

The concept is called threshold cryptography.  The general idea is you can specify both the total number of pieces (n) and the minimum number of pieces required to recreate the secret (m).  m of n are required to recreate the secret.

i.e.  4 of 5 pieces (or 11 of 13 of 2 of 10) are needed to rebuild private key


This can also be done using multi-sig but there are also methods to "break up" any secret which don't require a specific implementation in the bitcoin protocol or client support.

[Cablez]

That is a good idea D&T.  I will have to look into that.

The guy that sold me that +6 rubber hose repellant said I don't have to worry about that type of cryptanalysis attack. hur hur