Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: What is the best (safest) way to store BitCoin for the longer term?
by
bug.lady
on 09/03/2018, 12:04:16 UTC
Another option is to use a trusted program like "Veracrypt" (it's the new maintained version of Truecrypt) to create encrypted containers.

It basically makes a virtual disk drive of a user defined size, the contents of which is encrypted with AES-256. To quote https://veracrypt.codeplex.com/wikipage?title=AES

"In June 2003, after the NSA (US National Security Agency) conducted a review and analysis of AES, the U.S. CNSS (Committee on National Security Systems) announced in [1] that the design and strength of AES-256 (and AES-192) are sufficient to protect classified information up to the Top Secret level."

For example make a 20Mb encrypted container, secure it with a strong password, and put your backups in it. You can then email this file to yourself, keep it in your google drive, or keep it on a USB stick.

The encryption is good enough that the computer power required to break it would be better off mining blocks themselves for the 12.5 reward.
Yes it is a good option too, but beware that the more complicated you will make it, the higher the chance you made a simple mistake that will render your founds irretrievable! (as an example, I was really paranoid at the time and I created a multilevel structure of a passphrase protected wallets inside the password protected RAR archives inside the password protected hidden TrueCrypt volumes; I distributed the passwords to different levels to different family members. I was sooooo scared when I was untangling this mess).

In my opinion, currently the best option is a hardware wallet, it is simple, easy to use, very secure, and human-mistake proof.