Quote from: JimboToronto on Today at 01:54:50 AM

Quote from: Ambatman on March 16, 2024, 08:57:23 PM

Quote from: JimboToronto on March 16, 2024, 08:08:41 PM

You keep Bitcoin in a wallet?

I prefer cold storage addresses. Safer.

I thought they were all called wallet
Both Hot and cold.
Planning on getting one though
But considering the idle fund, not to mention not currently in my home base residence that I can feel better hiding it.
Heard its easier to hold with cold wallet since its time consuming to move your coin to a hot wallet

If you understand what dual-key cryptography is, an address consists of a public key and a private key. You don't need a wallet to generate addresses. I generate mine offline on a computer that cannot be connected to the internet (no wifi, no network cable). I print co-called paper "wallets" on a printer that has never had internet access. Printer spool buffers can be hacked. I use paper "wallets" for the convenience of scannable QR codes. I keep my bitcoins in as many addresses as is practical. Some of my older addresses contained 10 or 20 coins so I split them up into many smaller addresses. I never expose my addresses to the internet until I sweep their contents to a wallet program for redistribution.

Wallets on the other hand are Bitcoin handling programs which may or may not be associated with a hardware device. Wallet programs generate addresses and allow transfers to and from other wallet programs via the internet or QR scanning. They are usually secure but are still vulnerable to hackers and you must trust the makers of the hardware. See below. Open source wallet programs are a prerequisite. Wallet programs are convenient because of needing to keep track of many (possibly hundreds) of keys, you can just use a single passphrase.

When I acquire Bitcoin, I try to do so straight to one of the addresses I generated myself, via the public key. If you don't expose the private key, your bitcoins are safe. No need for a wallet program. When I sweep an address into a wallet program, I transfer the bitcoins as quickly as possible to the intended recipient and then put the remainder back into secure cold storage.

Quote from: JayJuanGee on March 16, 2024, 09:20:32 PM

When Jimbo refers to "cold storage address" he is referring to kinds of paperwallets, and many of us likely don't even know how to do paper wallets, and perhaps that makes them more secure, even though there have been some suggestions that some paperwallets had issues in terms of the way their keys were generated - but maybe they are also less vulnerable if there is ONLY a certain amount of value in each paper wallet, so it might be doubtful if they all might end up being compromised at one time, if any of them might have had been vulnerable to the ways their keys had been generated.

Similar with hardware wallets. They can have some vulnerabilities in key generation but also in terms of the way they interact with servers and even questions of back doors - though it is thought that the more open source they are then the less likely for trickery in terms of the code being run... I am surely not going to claim to be an expert or even to know about all of the various tradeoffs in terms of how much value might be held in certain ways in order to trigger different practices, because some kinds of solutions might take some time to learn and also to figure out that they might not be as great as they appear to be, which I think is the case with the new device (named Bitkey) launched by Block.. which is likely going to be very popular, yet it does not seem to be a device that is really facilitating self-sovereignty so I cannot be sure if it is worse to lead the masses in a kind of deception about their own level of self-sovereignty through such a device that is likely to be popular.

This is why I use secure cold storage addresses generated offline as I described above.

LoyceV