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Comment by aneth4 | Hacker News Reader

I'm a big believer in the future of bitcoin and hold a significant amount. However I find holding bitcoin terrifying. There is just so much that can go wrong - from data loss, to personal tragedy, to hackers, to algorithmic weaknesses.

Ultimately we probably need insured, trusted third parties to hold keys, such that even if there is a breach, someone financially viable is on the line to reimburse.

Individuals holding their own keys may be a nice dream, but its highly impractical for most people if they have a significant portion of their wealth in bitcoin. Certainly there will be very high net worth people and security maniacs who want to hold their own keys, but I believe most people will want a third party to guarantee them.

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If you hold a lot of coins you simply print out the keys and keep them in a safety deposit box in a bank. Problem solved

Or use the Armory offline wallet to store them on an encrypted non-networked storage, print the keys, do the above.

Don't you also need to destroy all other records of those keys?

Only if you don't trust the encryption on your cold wallet backup where you generated the keys. Personally I'd keep both, encrypted drive and printed keys then if say the bank is robbed or burns to the ground you can still transfer the coins.

You'd want to also make sure the printer isn't storing memory of those keys that were printed.

Some weird startup out of Europe is splitting up $2mil worth of coins on 3 USB encrypted sticks, using Shamir's secret sharing as the master key to decrypt (this according to Bitcoin magazine). Sounds like a bad idea I don't trust wear leveling drives that could fail taking all your coins with them

You can make Shamir's secret sharing redundant if you are worried about that.

You could make say, 6 USB drives, any 3 which can recovery your wallet. As long as no more than -half- fail you would then be fine. And you can set either number as high or low as you like, of course.

And it's not like wear leveling should come in to play if you aren't actually writing to them.

You guys are making my point. You are speaking a language most people don't begin to want to understand.

Printing out cryptographic keys and storing them in a safety deposit box, or using a clunky key management utility, is exactly the sort of step that will not work for most people.

I'm not talking about techies, early adopters, and fanatics. I'm talking about buckwild and clerks.

This is true. Until BTC can be insured, and thus, easy for most people to feel secure having, bitcoin is going to have a serious drag on widespread adoption.

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