Challenge

Holding Bitcoin for a longer time should include measures to still having access by yourself (or heirs like family members or trustworthy friends) to your funds in expected and also unexpected situations like:

• Death of the account holder
• Memory loss of the account holder
• Physical burglary
• Fire damage, damaging e.g. IT equipment and paper notes.
• Cyber attacks by hackers (spying account credentials, destruction/deletion of data, etc.)
• IT equipment failures (broken hard disk, etc.)
• Unthoughtful handling of IT equipment, e.g.
  • loosing access by installing a new operating system
  • loosing access by formatting the wrong hard disk
  • loosing access by activating data encryption
  • giving others unintended access by providing them unused IT equipment, by accident holding your account credentials

Proposed Steps to Follow

Summary

For holding Bitcoin long-term, you accept a bad usability for sending Bitcoin funds.

For an optimal security, your account credetials:

• are and have never been on any IT equipment being connected to the internet.
• are stored at a physical place, save from damages like fire, water, storm, etc. not accessible by burglars, pets, children and other unwanted individuals.

For an optimal usability to check your account balance (e.g. after you received further funds), you should have your account credentials at hand whenever needed.

To achieve this:

• Define your Bitcoin address offline, without any IT equipment, i.e.
  • Define a secret seed phrase and get to know an Bitcoin address (with BIP39 wordlist) and g
• Test the Bitcoin address, by sending a minor amount to your save Bitcoin address, i.e.
  • send a minor Bitcoin amount to this address
  • ensure the address contains the correct fund – e.g. by analysing the address with a Bitcoin block explorer like blockchain.com.
• Transfer your funds to this safe Bitcoin address.