Quote from: AliceWonderMiscreations on January 15, 2016, 03:02:36 PM

I have never had any bitcoins stolen from me. I have had USD stolen from me from PayPal.

Crypto works.

With respect to online wallets - the advice has ALWAYS been never keep very much in them.

I currently only use coinbase. It is possible my bitcoins there will be stolen. But I have this rule :

A) Never have more than 20% of my liquid bitcoins in coinbase
B) Never have more than $650 USD in coinbase

I define "liquid" bitcoins as bitcoins that are not in a cold address (paper wallet)

With that philosophy, I will never lose more than $650 and honestly rarely even that much is at risk, right now I have less than $10 USD there.

If you keep the bulk of your bitcoins that you are not planning to spend in properly generated cold addresses, they won't be stolen.

For bitcoins not in a cold address, if you keep the bulk of them in a full node wallet on an inexpensive PC that is dedicated to bitcoin and not used for other things (such as browsing this forum) - they won't be stolen. I personally use the standard bitcoin-qt client for that running in CentOS 7 but the actual distro is not terribly important. Point is Linux with no flash / java and only using the browser for business (pay bills in bitcoin, transfer purchased bitcoin out of coinbase to a generated address) then the risk of malware is extremely low.

Good idea to run unbound on the bitcoin machine but only listening on localhost. That helps protects it from DNS spoofing, but that's an advanced topic.

An Intel NUC is good for this. Cheap, small, low power. Samsung 250GB M.2 SSD gives plenty of room for the blockchain to grow. 8 GB (2x4) is enough. Use 64 bit distro.

Running full node client with bitcoin-qt also helps protect the bitcoin network. More people should. And use bitcoin-qt (you can run Armory to interface with the blockchain if you want)

good information, some of this is new to me and advanced. I will start googling. I have a spare laptop that I could dedicate to this.