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Best ways means the most reliable and robust, and meanwhile easy to access ways?
The best way to keep my private keys safe?
Answers
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The best way currently, that is still easy to access are hardware wallets. The two most famous retailers are:
Trezor: https://buytrezor.com/
Ledger: https://www.ledgerwallet.com/
A hardware wallet is dedicated hardware with a defined interface that makes it impossible to extract the private key from the hardware. The interface does however allow signing of transactions. This means that the hardware wallet can safely be plugged into hardware infected with malware.
Thanks. But digital products don't meet "robustness". – Urso – 2016-12-29T14:25:39.007
1I should maybe add that when creating the private key on the hardware wallets I linked to, they present a 24 word seed on a dedicated screen. These 24 words represents the base private key and the chain code.
This means that you can backup the wallet by storing these 24 words in method of your liking, that you find robust enough. A common recommendation is to write them on paper that you store in a fire- and waterproof safe. – Viktor T. – 2016-12-29T16:42:43.397
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Besides hardware wallets I also recommend desktop wallet Electrum which you can protect with username, password and two-factor authentication. Same as hardware wallets Electrum generates a HD wallet which means that in a case of disk failure you can restore whole wallet on another computer with the seed you were given at the beginning when you generated a HD wallet.
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For storing the seed I recommend Cryptosteel. It's waterproof, fireproof and made of stainless steel.
You're chances of getting an answer you like will be higher if you define the terms in bold. Otherwise, people might guess a wrong meaning of them. – UTF-8 – 2016-12-29T18:33:28.400
yes, but i don't have an idea about how to describe it in bold. i just feel the current ways (hardware wallet, qr-on-paper, flash disk, etc) are not both robust and reliable. is there any more creative way, maybe low tech way that outperforms the current methods? – Urso – 2016-12-29T23:41:12.730