To ensure the safe-keeping of your bitcoin, it's important to protect your private keys by following a short list of best practices:
Never store your private keys unencrypted on your hard drive or in the cloud: Unencrypted wallets can easily be stolen by hackers, viruses, or malware. Make sure your keys are always encrypted before being saved to disk.
Never send money to a Bitcoin address without a backup of the private keys: It's really important that you have a backup of your private key before sending money its public address. There are stories of early adopters who have lost significant amounts of bitcoin because of hardware failures or inadvertent mistakes.
Always test your backup process by repeating the recovery steps: When setting up a backup plan, make sure to test your plan by backing up your keys, sending a small amount to the address, and recovering the amount from the backup. Message signing and verification is also a useful way to test your private...
