How to store your crypto like a pro.

Cryptocurrency allows any individual to “be their own bank”. With this great power, comes great responsibility, and loss of wallet backups or hardware wallets can result in a loss of your sacred crypto.

Goals

To not end up like these people:

• Man Who Lost Bitcoin in Landfill Offers $72 Million To Dig it up
• Peter Schiff blames blockchain after losing access to Bitcoin wallet
• Bitcoin owner has only two guesses left to unlock $220m in cryptocurrency

You might have a private key, seed phrase, or password to unlock or restore your wallet, but let’s just call this your secret to make things simple.

Basic principles of secret storage.

1. Offline is Greater than Online

Your secret can be stored online or offline.

• offline: not connected to internet
• online: connected to the internet

Due to cyber security threats, offline storage is almost always more secure than online methods.

2. Know your ABCs

If plan A fails, what’s your plan B? If both plans A and B fails, then what’s your Plan C? If plans A, B, and C fail, then what’s plan D? Storing your secret in multiple different ways ensures you have more than one option to recover your secret. Of course, the limits are up to you.

3. Estate planning

When you die, will your crypto die with you? If you want your crypto assets to go to your kids, family, or charity, then you may consider including your crypto assets in your estate planning.

4. Do what works for you.

It doesn’t have to be rocket science. At the end of the day, store your secret safely in a method that best fits your circumstances.

Examples

Following the basic principles will be enough to store your wallet like a pro, but what’s the fun without some examples. You’re welcome to use any of these examples but remember — do what works for you.

Paper Wallet

Write your secret on a piece of paper and store it in a safe place. Lockboxes, vaults, lockable file cabinets, and gun safes are traditional methods you might be familiar with and maybe that’s your preference, but you might consider being more creative such as:

• inscribing the secret on a piece of art
• creating a fake product label with your secret on it
• writing your secret on a specific page in a book
• putting the paper wallet under a floorboard

Hardware Wallet

A hardware wallet is a dedicated plug-in device to store and sign your cryptocurrency transactions. It’s the crypto version of a physical Debit Card where you use the physical device to authorize transactions.

• https://www.ledger.com/
• https://trezor.io/
• https://shapeshift.com/keepkey

Encrypted File

If you’re going to store your secret on a computer or external disk, then encryption is recommended in case your computer was hacked or someone else finds your device. There are many free utilities to encrypt/decrypt and password-protect files:

• https://www.7-zip.org/
• https://www.win-rar.com/
• https://cryptomator.org/

Password Manager

A password manager that allows you to store your secret can be a convenient method. LastPass and Bitwarden are pretty good because the service provider store encrypted information that only you can unlock. Again, you’re trusting their service.

End-to-end Encrypted Cloud Storage

Do not use a cloud storage provider without encrypting any data before uploading or use a cloud storage service that provides end-to-end encryption by default.

• https://cryptomator.org/ allows you to encrypt your traditional cloud storage provider such as Google Drive, OneDrive, but only use this if you know what you’re doing.
• SpiderOak, MEGA, and Sync are some popular end-to-end encrypted cloud services.