Hi, I'm a bit of a newb with BTC although I've done a bit of research.
I've decided to use Kraken as the exchange (first on google rank!) and so I guess they must have some credibility.
The bigger question is that of an offline wallet?
According to:
https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet, there are 6 to choose from:
Bitcoin Core, Armory, Electrum, mSIGNA, MultiBit, Green Address - all of which have a weakness of some sort.
(My general approach for BTC is to just buy a few and hold them. If BTC goes global, I'll be happy, if not, and BTC becomes obsolete, no big loss.)
So, let's suppose I chose Electrum, which seems to be one of the easier ones to use.
If I download the wallet to a computer, can I then move the BTCs to an external HDD? Or, do I have to store them only on the computer? It's just that I have a netbook I don't use much with Windows 7 starter and thought I could use that. The question is, what happens if the HDD on the netbook fails, do I lose the BTCs?
I'm also a bit unclear about BTC addresses? When I buy the the BTCs on Kraken, for example, I have to give an address from my offline wallet? How is the address generated?
Thanks in advance.
You don't actually store any bitcoins. What you store are the private keys (necessary to spend the bitcoin). Think of the bitcoins themselves just like living on the blockchain. Electrum is a good and easy-to-use wallet. When you create your wallet it should prompt you to back it up -- or give you a seed to write down and store safely. You can then use your bitcoins on a totally different computer.