this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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Depending on your starting point there's a lot better opportunities out there that are less vulnerable to losing it all to a random hacker.
I'm not saying I won't be buying real estate in San Francisco, Magic The Gathering cards, and shares in big tech, but a solid backbone of 1000x value bitcoin is hard to beat on multiples.
Actually bitcoin on a physical harddrive purchased at $50 or below stored in a safety deposit box is pretty ironclad.
Bitrot might get you. printed out paper codes as a backup
That was a lot more difficult before BIP39 seed phrases were invented. You could of course write down anything, but there would've been a lot of room for error.
Spinning hard drives last for decades. You can pretty absolutely protect yourself by storing two with multiple copies of the key each
They are succeptible to magnetic degradation, its why you go to open a jpeg from 8 years ago and some are suddenly corrupt. You have to leave them in a RAID setup with sonething self healing like ZFS. They are way more reliable than cold storage SSD ( which can start bitrot in as little as a month) but for cold storage magnetic tape is better
Tape is just as susceptible to magnets, though it is a more stable medium. It's not like they'll be exposed to significant magnetic fields though
Its not just significant magnetic field ( apparently we do have geo magnetic storms that corrupt data) it is that assigning the 1 /0 bit is not permanent. The 1 or 0 you store fades with time as it wants to lose its assigned magnetism. You might be fine for 10 years, or you might lose a critical bit corrupting a file. it is why archival experts suggest if it is critical data stored offline you need to store on two or more different mediums, because "1 copy is not a backup". Anyway, we are getting deep in the weeds of data entropy and recovery and I think your original comment was meant as being helpful to the lay-person...whom may not actually care to much if they lose a file or two, unless it is a crypto wallet key--i would trust those M series BluRay archival format since the laser alters the disk, but printing out on paper as another copy
I must have been lucky with my 286's 20MB hdd
You definitly have been. I have not been so lucky. Lost various data on 10-15 year old drives ( stored in climate controlled basement ) , nothing critical, but enough to prompt me to do regular full copy off and back on process as a refresh
I probably should take another image of the 286 and diff it against the earlier backup
And if I time travel, I'll put the key on a hard drive, tape, DVD, and archive quality dvd
Since we get all the information we have now: the correct answer was Bitcoin Armory. You'd have a dedicated computer just for signing transactions, carried back and forth over flash drives.
Many of us are tech nerds. We know that those who lost bitcoin to hacks trusted coin exchanges too much.
The people who kept their wallet offline are fine Those who kept their wallet in the cloud are poor