I hope to move my bitcoin from Coinbase to a wallet of some kind, but all of the options I am reading about are making me very nervous. I have a 14 year old laptop and a phone that I hope to replace sometime this year. Both of these are at high risk of dying so I do not want to risk losing all of my bitcoin if they're on a wallet on either of these devices.
How can I securely store my bitcoin away from electronics? Is there a method where I could just toss something into my safe with my precious metals and use that to access it at some point?
I REALLY don't want to keep it on my current devices, but even a brand new phone could be lost in a taxi, then I'd lose all of my bitcoin too? This does NOT sound safer than just keeping it with Coinbase..
Offline Storage Question
byu/PorcelainHammer inBitcoinBeginners
Posted by PorcelainHammer
3 Comments
Yeah, that’s exactly the point of a wallet: it gives you a seed phrase (12-24 words) when creating it, which you can write down on paper (or elsewhere – some people engrave it).
That seed phrase **is** your wallet. Every single private key held by your wallet can be deterministically derived from that single seed phrase that you’ll have written down.
Therefore, it doesn’t matter whether your phone *and* laptop die one day. As long as you have your seed phrase written down, you’ll always be able to re-generate your wallet on a new device in the future.
Jade
BTC won’t be on your phone or laptop, or in your wallet. They are at a public address that only you will have the keys to spend them from that address. To simplify things, your wallet holds your key, but that key can be used/recreated anywhere as long as you know it. It’s usually represented as 24 words.