Hi team,
I am today popping my crypto cherry, I am struggling with quite a lot but get the gist of it. Can someone please tell me how I store my coins on a USB?
It’s handy to also always have a backup of your coins online, in case you loose your usb.
Best way to store your coins is a brainwallet, look here:
https://www.bitaddress.org (actually you should NEVER click on links that people give you, THEY CAN STEAL YOUR COINS)(they can send you to a site where you input your privatekey and get it stolen or a website that installs malware on your computer, so be super careful, on which links you click even on Reddit)
With a brainwallet you can use whatever sentence you want for instance
This sentence got
Bitcoin Address: 13bLnKUZ1E4AVqqrWVwPic9NAPrHeUMS2r
Private Key (Wallet Import Format): 5KfWGg8FftSWhYfy9eRZXDyzpHABJJxsuWkzV7mTF8rdTmRVVTo
Never, I repeat NEVER put 5KfWGg8FftSWhYfy9eRZXDyzpHABJJxsuWkzV7mTF8rdTmRVVTo on an usb, people savvy enough will know that that is a bitcoin address format.
I would advice you to split up your brainwallet on different email accounts online. For example email#1 got
email#2
Notice that email#1 line shows email#2 where it should start "gist of it. "
If you still got questions ask, it’s better to have a sentence that is part of a diary or whatever 
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I would strongly advise against using a brain wallet, or storing any keys online. If you search Google you will find many stories of people losing coins due to someone having the keys corresponding to the brain wallet they tried to use. Humans are terrible at randomness.
Use a paper wallet or hardware wallet.
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That’s the advice everybody always trots out, and it’s good to caution people. But @19eddyjohn75’s suggestion seems very good. The idea of selecting a sentence from your diary/journal is pretty genius, especially if you selected an obviously unique and complex sentence containing the birthday and name of your son’s friend’s pet frog!
The user must just keep in mind how mind numblingly huge the number of permutations that can be attempted will be. After downloading the blockchain to their large RAM drive, there is basically little limiting how fast they can test different phrases against the entire blockchain. That humbles you a lot, but it’s obviously possible to come up with an acceptable brain wallet, if you’re humble enough.
What is cool about SAFE, is that there is built in rate limiting. The fact that each attempt must access the SAFE network, with all the latency that implies, creates a rate limiter that is a huge impediment to this sort of brute force attack.
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This is the part that is pretty much impossible to quantify. The people who lost money in brain wallets probably either a) didn’t realize the importance of this, or b) thought their phrase was unique or obscure enough when it turned out not to be the case. The point is it isn’t a fool proof method, and recommending it to someone who just said they are brand new sounds like a bad idea to me.
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@Indisingh1844 here is a good example how you can loose money. Just a scam site to steal people their money when they click on the link. First lesson don’t click on link on Slack, Reddit or your email from strangers.
Yeah Slack in general is awful for phishing emails in my experience. A word of advice to all out there - if you ever sign up to Slack, give an email address which you ONLY use for Slack. And any email you receive to that address treat with extreme caution. I now use a unique email address for every service I sign up to and the only emails which have come close to tricking me are the ones I receive to my Slack email address. They’re quite well targeted according to the slack channels you sign up to I think.
Has anyone else experienced this?
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Email is often sent in plain text through all sorts of servers which could keep records. If your sentence is very unique and you overlap the split as in your example, my paranoid self worries about this. It’s definitely worth using different (and preferably unrelated) email accounts as you suggest. But I’d go a step further and encrypt the text (although this could make it stand out). There’s also the question of ownership of the emails. It might be sensible to download them so they’re not only in the cloud (where you don’t really own them). But if you download them it’s hard to keep them segregated.
I’m annoying myself now! Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!
There’s just so much to think about with so many attack vectors.
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You could create an encrypted volume or file on a usb stick using something like Veracrypt (maybe even a hidden file inside that for plausible deniability). Also, keep multiple copies in multiple locations.
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