I have successfully transferred bitcoins into my head. They can't be hacked. They exist nowhere but in my head. If I die, they die with me.
As crazy as this sounds, it's true.
I simply picked a passphrase, and turned it into a bitcoin address with my open source Casascius Bitcoin Utility (available from github). When I want to spend the funds, I will simply use the same passphrase to generate the same private keys, import them into a real wallet.dat, and then spend them.
What's my purpose in making this point? While the entire Bitcoin community is reeling over the loss of Mybitcoin.com - not just the site, but the realization that keeping bitcoins in a web wallet is fundamentally flawed - I really want to pound in the idea that bitcoins can be kept on paper and in the form of codes or passphrases. And when people do this, the bitcoins cannot be hacked.
Every sentence you can think of, corresponds to a Bitcoin address. The bitcoin address can be given out freely, the sentence is the password that allows spending of bitcoins. Once upon a time, I stored 0.25 bitcoins in the sentence "This string contains 0.25 BTC hidden in plain sight."... others were successfully able to retrieve the 0.25 BTC given the sentence.
The future of practicing safe Bitcoin is for people to be able to keep their private keys offline. If you operate a Bitcoin-based website or exchange or are working on client code, please, for the future of Bitcoin, include the ability for people to enter and redeem the funds off of hand-typed private keys.
Could you explain the process behind those apps?
I'm thinking of using a different type of wallet along with my Safebit wallet, one that will allow users to move addresses from place to place rather than them being attached to a singular wallet file, which I find extremely inefficient and quite simply a stupid idea in the first place when you can store individual addresses and manipulate them directly.
