Bitcoin offline wallet

Modern operating systems are getting more and more complex. The flip side of all this complexity is that they generally have a large attack surface and constantly leak information without the user’s knowledge or consent. No matter how many precautions you take, your wallets will never be 100% safe on a computer that is connected to the internet.

Because bitcoins are stored directly on your computer and because they are real money, the motivation for sophisticated and targeted attacks against your system is higher than in the pre-bitcoin era, when only large organizations normally had to worry about such attacks.

This guide will instruct you on how to create an offline wallet, a wallet that never even touches the internet in its plaintext form. Another term for this is cold storage. This security measure is also referred to as being an air gap. For all practical purposes, this wallet is safe from all online threats, such as viruses and hackers. It is however still exposed to offline threats, such as hardware keyloggers, extortion, or people looking over your shoulder. A best practice is to keep the majority of your bitcoins in the offline wallet and only to use the online wallet for everyday expenses/earnings.

The below procedure may seem tedious, but remember that security almost always comes at the cost of convenience. When you deposit money at a bank, you let them worry about security. Bitcoins, however, are stored on your computer and that means you are fully responsible for securing them. The bitcoin ecosystem is still very young and unfortunately no user friendly tools for creating highly secure wallets have been developed yet (though some members of the Bitcoin community are ).