Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Topic OP
Long-term safe storage of Bitcoins
by
tinyapps
on 11/03/2013, 16:25:30 UTC
If Bitcoins are stored long-term offline or on paper as described in these links:

How to set up a secure offline savings wallet
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_to_set_up_a_secure_offline_savings_wallet

Paper wallet
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Paper_wallet

Offline USB/CD and Paper Bitcoin Wallets
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/offline-usb-cd-and-paper-bitcoin-wallets/

will they be useable forever, even after the various soft and hard forks we've been hearing about lately? Or is there some chance they could become unusable?

The reason I ask is this: After not firing up Bitcoin-Qt for a year or so, I upgraded to the latest version and had a bit of a scare when it initally reported all of my Bitcoins as unconfirmed:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=150802.0

It took a 7GB+ download of the blockchain to restore them to my balance.