Bitcoin BoardSecurity is a very important thing when you have Bitcoins. We get a lot of questions about securing your Bitcoin wallets, so we figured it would be useful to make a basic guide to secure your Bitcoins safely. The methods we give you will protect you against losing your wallet if your computer crashes & Getting your Bitcoins stolen by hackers.
The first thing to do is to encrypt your wallet with a password. The best Bitcoin wallets (Multibit, Bitcoin-QT, Electrum) all have the option to encrypt your wallet.dat file. This means that you can’t send BTC without entering a password that only you know. Be careful though, if you forget the password, your wallet is lost forever. There is no option to recover it via email, so make sure that you store it safely incase you might ever forget it. We recommend that you write it on a piece of paper, and then put that piece of paper in a safe. Never store your passwords on a computer or cloud server.
A second thing you could do is to store a part of your BTC’s on a paper wallet. Paper wallets are generated by websites like bitcoinpaperwallet.com, and they include an adress & private key. The paper wallet can be generated offline and you can print it to store it in a safe location. You can send Bitcoins to the adress on the paper wallet, and you can always lookup the adress in the blockchain. If you want to spend your Bitcoins you can import the private key with almost any BTC Client, and then the Bitcoins will be added to your wallet. Just like the password, store your private key in a place that only you know. If the private key is lost, your BTC’s will be gone.
To prevent your Bitcoins from being lost when your computer crashes, we advice you to make a backup of your private keys. Store them on a dedicated USB stick, which has never been connected with a computer that has internet. When exporting your private keys, disconnect your computer from the internet & connect the USB key. Export the private keys to the USB drive, and store it in a safe location.
