Is it worth it for a beginner to buy a flash drive to buy bitcoin?

Question

bitcoin

I want to buy a small amount of bitcoin for a start within $1000. Is it worth it to buy a flash drive for this or is it possible on a macbook with an SSD drive? I have a fear that if something happens to the macbook, will I lose my bitcoin funds?

Answer 1

Write down passwords for several cloud services, for a couple of flash drives and for a computer / laptop

Answer 2

Is it worth it to buy a flash drive for this or is it possible on a macbook with an SSD drive?

A modern flash drive, if it is not some kind of super-reliable one (I don’t know such ones, however, I wasn’t interested in them) is an extremely unreliable storage medium.
I read about complaints from a number of users about the relatively rapid wear of the SSD in fresh macbooks, but the flash drive is definitely less reliable.
For $1000 worth of data protection, you should definitely not skimp on backups.

Answer 3

The state of your wallets is stored on the blockchain network. Offline storages (cold wallets) store private keys to access and manage your wallets. Those. if you lose your private keys, you will lose access to your funds, but not the funds themselves. But if your private keys fall into the hands of an attacker, then in this case you will lose your funds. It is the task of safe storage that cold wallets solve.
Private keys can be recovered from the so-called. BIP39 mnemonic phrase - a set of >=12 words of a special structure that you will receive when creating a wallet. Be sure to save it in several safe places. This will keep you from losing access to your assets if you lose access to your cold wallet.

Answer 4

To access coins, it is necessary to store information - a private key (or rather, a list of all private keys for which coins will be received, including change when spending less than the full amount)
. it is necessary to solve the issue of reliable storage of information, namely its safety for a long time, the inaccessibility of this information to third parties and, most importantly, safe use, so that both of these conditions can be further satisfied.
One of the most convenient brain wallet mechanisms from the point of view of using (not to be confused with the service of the same name) is auto-generation of private keys and addresses based on the key seed (in the form of a seed phrase of 12 English words), which is enough to save / write down or even memorize or even come up with it yourself (carefully, all combinations of invented phrases or parts of texts are checked and coins are stolen at the very moment they appear on the account - i.e. you can safely use only randomly generated seed phrases ). The advantage and disadvantage of the approach is that one seed phrase will allow you to access coins at all addresses in the future, generated on its basis, i.e. the backup will not need to be updated when using the wallet (when you need to do this when using bitcoin core).The oldest, most convenient and functional bitcoin wallet with this function is electrum (opensource, python), lightning network was added in version 4 . To use it, it is enough to take reliable equipment (without bugs), boot from some ubuntu livecd and run the wallet from it, specifying the seed phrase.
A flash drive is one of the worst storage methods, for example, if you put a flash drive without using it, then in a few years it may lose the saved data (discharge leakage). The same can probably be done with other media, one way or another, a long period of passive storage is associated with various risks.
Data can be saved by writing it down on paper or even engraved on a metal / glass plate, with straight hands and equipment, the qr code can be scribbled manually (seed is a 128bit number) or with the cheapest 3d printer / engraver (I hope you don’t need to explain what to trust printing to a third party means trusting him with this seed phrase?). Yes, this information can be pre-encrypted with a password, and the password itself can be remembered, but it will be the same as remembering the seed itself.
The most reliable is non-passive storage of information with a password on several media and online storage services with constant monitoring (for example, once a month), so the password is easy to remember and protect against loss / breakage

Answer 5

Make several encrypted copies of the key file, store them in geographically dispersed places. Then the loss of any of the drives, or even several, will not lead to a loss of funds.