How to protect cryptocurrencies from natural disasters?

Today, all of Poland is living what is happening in Lower Silesia. Of course, it is about the flood. Many people are probably wondering how to secure their cryptocurrencies in such circumstances – a natural disaster. In this text, you will receive some advice from me.

Cryptocurrencies – are they really that safe?

Cryptocurrencies are interesting assets from an investment perspective. However, you also need to know how to store them safely.

It is best to keep gold in a fireproof safe. This will protect your coins or bars from fire. It is worse with a flood. How do you escape from a flooded apartment or house with a large and heavy trunk? Even quickly taking the gold out of it and hiding it in a bag, for example, is not safe. After all, the latter can fall out of your hand and drown in deep water.

With cryptocurrencies, it’s easier. All you need to do is somehow secure your private key, which is a series of characters and numbers that are your password to access the address in the blockchain. In practice, all you need is a small piece of paper with the key written on it (or even better, several such pieces of paper). You just need to hide this in a place that is not exposed to fire and water. Again, it can be a safe. In the event of an evacuation, the pieces of paper can be placed in foil (protection against water) and taken with you.

The same should be done with a hardware wallet. This looks like a pendrive, so it is also very easy to transport. When buying one, it is worth paying attention to whether the device is waterproof. It probably won’t be. Therefore, there is another form of protection against the effects of fire or flood.

Cryptosteel

Cryptosteel is a device used to secure the seed phrase of a cryptocurrency wallet. In practice, it can store 123 characters. The user enters them themselves. So no one else – including the manufacturer – will know them.

The Cryptosteel capsule is water, fire and shock resistant. It is made of stainless steel. It contains all ASCII characters. This means that you can use it to archive strings of characters – seed phrases or other passwords.

How does it work? It is well explained in the videos below:

The procedure for securing the seed phrase looks like this:

  • create recovery phrases from the included marked tiles (if you want to store a seed phrase longer than 12 words, use only the first four characters of each word),
  • arrange the tiles in the correct order on the capsule core,
  • closed capsule, store in a safe place.

Safety first!

Remember that you are the one who has to take care of the security of your cryptocurrencies. Not a bank or any institution. You don’t have a private key, bitcoins are not yours! That’s why it’s worth preparing for extreme cases – including floods, fires, and even war. It’s worth considering how to safely store your private key or seed phrases.