A question to the Steemit community
10 / 5 / 2016 - 4:55 PM EST STEEMIT NEWS FLASH : A question to the Steemit community .
Is there an offline wallet to store Steem ? Like the Bitcoin wallets .
If anyone knows of any and where to find one please share .
Please voice your opinions in the comments below.
If you find any of this information useful to you. Please upvote and follow. THANK YOU
There's the cli wallet for STEEM.
Bitcoin wallet doesn't actually have the coins in the wallet. It only has the privatekeys that gives you control over your bitcoins that exist in the blockchain.
artific thank you for your input , I did not realize that the coins are still on the blockchain , so what you're saying the bitcoins I have on a wallet on my trezor could still be hacked
If the media on which your wallet keys are stored is connected to the internet, they can theoretically be hacked. The coins never actually move. The ledger is a record of who owns them. Your keys are the proof that you are that 'who'. If I find your keys, I can claim to be that 'who' and the rest of the network (anyone acting as a witness by maintaining a copy of the ledger) will recognize me as such and record whatever transaction I make with those coins.
The problem with all of those web service wallets, for any cryptocoin, is that you never even have the keys to begin with. They are recorded and kept confidential by whomever is running the web service. You are trusting that service to follow good data security practices and keep your keys from being compromised. The trade off of course, is that the web service or exchange wallet is much more convenient with regards to executing transactions. Here's my advice, and the examples are present are just examples, not endorsements:
Let's use BTC.
Open a coinbase account. Treat this like your checking account. This is the primary means for sending and receiving currency. Don't plan to leave large amounts of coin here long term.
Set up a CLI wallet. This is your savings account. The amount of coin that you're going to hold long term gets transferred to this wallet address. You keep the wallet file stored on an encrypted USB drive. You should rarely access it from your computer, just like you would rarely make withdrawls from your savings account. Only ever plug it into a computer that you trust is secure. You will need to have a running daemon with a synced blockchain when you do want to unlock this wallet to send funds from it to another address. You DO NOT need to do so for it to receive funds. You only need to know it's address. I have wallets that I haven't looked at since the day they were created. I just keep track of the deposits which I have made to them.
Some people will take this a step further with an offline paper wallet. In this case, the keys to the wallet are recorded on paper and all digital copies are destroyed and never exposed to the network. This would be like your retirement account. You don't plan on accessing it for a very long time.
Hope that makes sense.
sdred955 Thank you for taking so much of your time to talk about this . Another question for you though how safe do you think the coinbase cold storage wallet is .
That's been a hotly debated subject from what I've read. Personally I don't use it. I don't think it's an equal substitute for keeping your own encrypted set of keys. I do use coinbase regularly in the capicity which I described however. They are a responsible and reputable company and its likey that you would never have an issue using their cold storage. It really comes down to how in control you want be I suppose. It's like the vast majority of Windows users have never had their computers hacked or their data stolen. I still like how much more in control of my machine I feel using Linux. The trade off with being able to be more hands on is that I have to be more hands on because Linux makes fewer decisions for me until i tell it to. Another example would be driving a manual vs an automatic. Is one really 'more right'?
Thank you again sdred955 for all the time you spent here I up voted and followed you
@artific up voted your comment and followed
I do not know of any
Thanks for your comment otisbrown