And if so, do you have a lot of it? The thing i read is bitcoins can get hacked very easily and you need to store bitcoins in a paper wallet. However this if for long term storage and if u do lot of bitcoin tranactions, then paper wallet is not necessary. However bitcoins seem to be very complicated as paper wallet etc is not easy to do for someone thats not tech savy or computer savy.
I have bitcoins, but I don’t hold them as an investment vehicle, I just use it for making on-line payments. (Mostly ordering food; almost all restaurants in my country which do deliveries, can be paid in bitcoin.) I have less than 1BTC at any given time. So if lost the contents of my electronic wallet somehow, I’d be annoyed but not devastated, same as with the paper money in my physical wallet.
If you want to keep a large value in BTC, then indeed security becomes more important. Whether you need an offline (“paper”) wallet or not, depends on how confident you are about keeping your computer secure.
I wouldn’t recommend it for people who are not tech-savvy and who are not confident, or simply don’t want to go to the trouble, to take care of their own security. Then again, if you don’t have those skills then other alternatives aren’t necessarily safe either – I know several people who lost huge amounts of money because scammers managed to trick them into installing a trojan onto their PC and then accessing their bank account in a way which allowed the scammers to redirect their transfers…
I have bitcoins. Or, more accurately, a very small piece of one. Not as an investment. For rare purchases.
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Since this is more of an informal poll than a factual question it belongs in IMHO.
Moving thread from General Questions to In My Humble Opinion.
I have one of these: https://www.bitcointrezor.com/
Because the device signs all transactions internally and never transmits private information to your computer, it’s very safe. There’s nothing to hack. You need to have physical possession of the Trezor to spend your bitcoins.
Even if you lose the Trezor, anyone without your PIN won’t be able to use it, and you can recover any accounts you had on your Trezor with a “recovery seed” that you write down on a piece of paper when you activate the device and then keep somewhere safe (I keep mine in a safe deposit box).
Trezor also has a neat defense against brute-forcing the PIN. Every time a PIN is entered incorrectly, you have to wait some amount of time before trying again. At first it’s just a second or so, but it increases exponentially, to the point that it would take years to try a reasonable number of PINs.
For relatively small amounts of bitcoins, it’s pretty safe to keep them in an online wallet like Coinbase, which has two-factor authentication.
How long did it took for you to receive the bitcointrezor? Yes i have heard of it and i read thats the one thing u should get if u have lot of bitcoin and do transfers but bad in computer etc.
Are you familiar with ledgerwallet? That seems to be another hardware device but it doesn’t cost as much as the trezor.
Are you familiar with blockchain? Would u say its safer to keep funds in blockchain or coinbase?
Are you familiar with the computer clients like multibit, armory, electrum? I was told those are pretty good as well and it makes sending much easier. However i read you have to create a backup file in case?
It took a few weeks for me to get the Trezor, not really an unreasonable amount of time for being shipped from the Czech Republic to the USA.
Of all the other things you mentioned, I’m only somewhat familiar with Electrum, which I did use for a while. Like Trezor, it allows you to create a backup “seed” to recover the wallet if you ever lose the password or get hacked or something (though you’d have to recover it before the hacker transferred all your coins out). Since everything happens on the computer, though, it’s susceptible to viruses and keyloggers.
My personal preference is to keep my savings in the Trezor and small change on Coinbase, but there are probably millions of other good ways of doing it that I don’t know about.