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Comment by pmorici | Hacker News Reader

A better way to store your coins is to to get a HD hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano S, or KeepKey. These paper wallets are too vulnerable to destruction. With an HD wallet you get a 24 word seed (see BIP39) and if anything ever happens to the wallet you just buy a new one and restore from the see. To protect your seed you can carve the words into a block of brass which has a high enough melting point that it should survive a house fire. You can use something like a Bantam Milling machine if you don't want to do it by hand.

For smaller amounts of money there is also OpenDime. They don't provide a back-up mechanism though so if the hardware goes your money is lost forever.

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> To protect your seed you can carve the words into a block of brass which has a high enough melting point that it should survive a house fire. You can use something like a Bantam Milling machine if you don't want to do it by hand.

And people say that Bitcoin isn't user-friendly for beginners.

Tell me about how you secure your cash from fire without giving it to a bank.

It isn't. So what? Things will get better. And even if it doesn't, those who really need bitcoin will be able to use it.

Who “really needs to use it,” in your estimation?

Bitpeople - folks made out of actual bits and bytes.

They don't have the option of using physical currency, but coins made from actual bits is a good option for them.

Bitcoin mining also provides bitpeople with a good job and steady income.

People whose freedoms are challenged by authorities they didn’t consent to.

...that would be at odds with the reality that much of these currencies are hoarded.

Why?

How is hoarding something like Bitcoin, or the world of ICOs anything like oppressed people exercising freedoms?

Whataboutism. If people is bitcoin for other things, fine. What matters is the network is also available when and where it is needed.

> With an HD wallet you get a 24 word seed (see BIP39) and if anything ever happens to the wallet you just buy a new one and restore from the seed.

You can do exactly the same with paper wallets, for what it's worth. Think of the paper wallet as you hardware wallet's backup. Store it securely in 2 places and you're ok.

That's fine for storing, the problem is that you need the key to sign any tx, so if you just have the paper wallet you need to import it to a computer or mobile device each time you need to do it while if you have an hw device the key never leaves it

Paper wallets expose your key though because you need to use a computer and printer to generate and create them.

You've never heard of using a pen?

You can also use dice. Just throw a few dice into a tray and keep them facing the same way. Put them in a safe.

It's pretty old-world advice to not leave all of your money "in one basket".

If you're going to store large amounts of BTC or any other digital store of value, why would you do it on one device unless you trust it absolutely?

The currency is supposed to be trustless, ultimately. Should you really put all of your trust into one device, manufactured in bulk outside of your purview? Especially when it may (in some cases, but sadly not mine) contain hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions!

I tend to store in a few mediums (including a low-capacity SD card), in places I know, with backup seeds in other inconspicuous locations. It's not high tech, necessarily.

That said, I don't do much regular trading, so I don't need to plug my [hardware wallet] in and pipe funds around often. If I want to trade, I tend to wait until I can buy more and in the interim watch the goings on.

I really think that stuff is neat tech, but not useful unless you want to day trade, or use cryptocurrencies for regular purchases.

I wouldn't trust my crypto savings to any kind of flash memory device especially MicroSD cards those things, are super unreliable for long term storage. I don't trade at all buy and hold only.

No doubt. I don't condone leaving them as your sole source of storage at all.

It's easy for short-term, however. And nearly as convenient as any USB option these days, but more compact.

That's why I keep other backups in other forms as well. I operate the same way: buy and hold.

Or you just encrypt it properly and with a secure password you have memorized, and upload it to a cloud server which you trust will not disappear all of a sudden and upload it there. Then, you decrypt it every know and then to check the files integrity and that you still remember the hash. If you ever believe the account might have been hacked, you just move the coins to another wallet just-to-be-safe.

Another alternative (if you are not good at remembering passwords) is to give a piece of paper to a family member or good friend with the key and tell them to store it safely. This is no different then giving them a spare key or give them authorization to your bank account/deposit

There are also tools that allow to take your seed and split it in m subgroups so that you need at least n out of m to rebuild it. So instead of giving password to a single family member (or two relatives, half and half) you can give it to more people and you can still recreate it even if some lose it

>To protect your seed you can carve the words into a block of brass which has a high enough melting point that it should survive a house fire. You can use something like a Bantam Milling machine if you don't want to do it by hand.

Not sure if trolling or not, but just use Cryptosteel: https://cryptosteel.com/

I had access to a milling machine so it was easier and cheaper to just carve it in a cheap block of machine brass. Crypto steel is an option though.

I wrote a breakdown of how to set one up and test it properly; plus gave some background on hardware wallets here - https://medium.com/@rhs/setting-up-testing-a-bitcoin-hardwar...

How much bitcoin would you have to own for that to be worth the effort.

Hah. Recently I went searching for old wallets of mine. Found .5 BTC in Blockchain and .1 in each of 3 Coinbase accounts. At the time I had created each those the BTC they contained was all worth less than a dollar. It was neat to find about $2k "in the couch", but also infuriating that I couldn't find more. I also have a locked wallet with 2.5BTC that I can't unlock (although I have John the Ripper plugging away at it) again which was worth nearly nothing at the time I made it.

So the short answer is, there is practically no quantity of Bitcoin too small to be worth properly securing it. If it's enough to be transactable (not dust) then for the love of god secure it and with luck your kids will be truly thankful that you did.

How have you set up John the Ripper? Is it on a desktop wallet? Interested due to a similar situation although it's a lot less than 2.5BTC

Easy enough to install on Linux there are plenty of guides. Just a few commands to grab the source and tools to build it and then compile the binaries.

Once you have that, there's a tool (python script I think) to extract the hash from the wallet.dat. Then you run it against that.

The hardest and most important part is seeding a proper word list for it to work off of. The default dictionary probably isn't going to crack it.

A hardware wallet like the Ledger Nano S only costs $50 so I would recommend that for people with as little as a fe hundred bucks.

How you choose to protect your back-up seed really depends on the amount of value you are protecting. Writing it on paper and storing it in a fire proof safe or safe deposit box might be good enough.

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