"Air gapped" is not good enough to protect your Bitcoin

Your bank notes under your mattress are air gapped - there is an air between them and the burglars.

Is this air stopping them from just taking your money and spend it?

If you are worried that you may forget the password you can still keep unencrypted copies hidden somewhere safe (or your passphrase), but you can also make encrypted (with good key stretching) copies on cloud services (DropBox, Mega, Google Drive, Gmail, etc.).

If you keep your seed in a safe deposit box (at the bank), the bank employees can open it and steal your coins. Also, the government can demand opening of your safe deposit box and steal your gold and crypto.

Archiving private keys - TLDR version

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Do not use (only) flash memory (SSD drives, hardware wallets, USB flash drives) for your precious private keys!

Image
Flash memory is not a reliable medium for archives. Especially when there is no regular power. I have personal experience with usb flash drive not powered for weeks - one file became corrupted . (Read more here: Archiving private keys - TLDR version. ) You should always back up on paper and other mediums. Flash memory is prone to failure if it is not powered for weeks or more and if there are ionizing radiation When you write your precious private keys you should use technologies like Parchive and ZFS . And make several copies of your files. It's OK if you use your USB flash drive for another backup, but don't rely on it! Always back up on DVDs (even small files!), paper and online (after encryption with CPU and RAM intensive key derivative function like scrypt). Here is example of using the scrypt utility: $ sudo apt-get install scrypt $ scrypt enc -M 1073741824 -t 200 secret.txt encrypted.scrypt Do not use default values of "-M" and "-t", they...
Read more

Archiving private keys - TLDR version

0. Make multiple encrypted copies. On DVDs (they are better than CDs and Blu-Ray discs; DVD+R are better than DVD-R), paper, cloud services like DropBox, OneDrive, Google Drive, e-mail it to yourself and to your friends, use P2P storage services like MaidSafe, Storj and Sia , etc. 1. Use proper font when printing PGP encrypted keys on paper. 2. Flash memory (SSD, USB flash drives, hardware wallets) is less reliable when not powered regularly (i.e. every week). 3. Use error correction methods like Parchive and ZFS. 4. Print on paper or store on digital media only encrypted data. 5. Your encryption software should use CPU/RAM-intensive KDF (i.e. scrypt with secure options - do not use defaults! ). First, encrypt with scrypt and then encrypt it again with PGP (using different password!) in ASCII armor mode before print it (other methods like QR codes may not be reliable as multiple copies of the PGP ASCII armor). Do not use the same password for the PGP because it's easy to brute...
Read more
[ad removed]