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I was curious to know if anyone knows of any bitcoin business that stores people's wallets offline?

I'm looking to diversify my backup methods for cold storage and am wanting to send my backups to a company that can store it for me securely.

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In my opinion trusting a third party with your Bitcoin savings is kind of against the grain of Bitcoin.

It makes perfect sense to keep day to day amounts on hot wallets either on your phone or online by using services such as Coinbase, Blockchain.info, Circle and their likes. These companies offer various cold storage options (e.g. coinbase vault) and there are other vendors that specialize in cold storage solutions, e.g. xapo

All these are viable options and have a place on the ever denser continuum of options to store bitcoins, and in all these cases you surrender some control over your bitcoins for the benefit of simplicity and ease of use. However, part of the appeal of Bitcoin is the fact that by design you can maintain 100% control over your bitcoins. If you choose to do so, let me recommend CoinCooler (disclosure: I'm the founder).

CoinCooler helps you generate and encrypt digital files containing cold storage addresses and keys in a way that is guaranteed to be 100% offline. It also includes splitting the encryption password into shares (as was recommended above by Christopher). Basically, its a tool that helps you perform cold storage of bitcoins in a way that is easy and secure so that, hopefully, you will consider doing it yourself and not rely on a third party.

Good luck!

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  • Great answer! All of your suggestions are exactly what I was looking for! I may be reaching out to you for more questions(on CoinCooler).
    – user249656
    May 5, 2015 at 18:31
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Safety deposit boxes, possibly multiple boxes at different banks plus the usage of Shamir's Secret Sharing, would seem to be the best option.

I'm not aware of any other individual-oriented secure storage businesses (e.g. Iron Mountain for individuals; Iron Mountain and similar businesses seem to be mostly for largish-scale storage / B2B).

Implementations of Shamir's Secret Sharing include this one by Lennart Poettering which is often available under the package name of ssss in many Linux distros (including Debian and Ubuntu), and also the Armory bitcoin wallet.

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  • Thanks. I haven't heard of Shamir's Secret Sharing before. I'll have to look into it. I've been using Armory for a while now. I think ill go the route of creating multiple offline backups and sending them to my parents and relatives for safe storage in our personal safes.
    – user249656
    May 4, 2015 at 16:05
  • @user249656 in Armory, Shamir's Secret Sharing is what's used to implement the "Fragmented Backup (M-of-N)" feature. May 4, 2015 at 16:10
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There are also many options for storing your bip 38 encrypted private keys on physical coins. Many of them are DIY options including www.mycryptovault.net They allow you full control of your bitcoin cold storage!

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  • Welcome to the Bitcoin Stack Exchange. If you are affiliated with the service you are promoting here, please say so either in this answer or in your user profile. Since your answer does seems to be appropriate for the question, however, I will not mark it as spam.
    – morsecoder
    Jun 23, 2015 at 15:41

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