A survey, which has posted to Reddit, shows that most crypto holders store their Bitcoins in hardware wallets and keep a backup of their private keys on a sheet of paper.
It has been reported that Gunnaj, a Reddit user, posted the results of the survey as part of his Ph.D. thesis to Reddit on April 30.
However, the doctoral student asked 339 people five questions related to Bitcoin (BTC) security by focusing on how crypto holders handle their private keys.
When participants were asked where they stored the majority of their Bitcoins, almost half (158 people) has said that they used a hardware wallet such as those offered by Ledger, TREZOR, and BitLox, as hardware wallets can store both a user’s crypto wallet and private keys.
Cybersecurity was also a topic under discussion in Gunnaj’s thesis, as roughly 88% of those surveyed said that they kept backups of their keys, with the majority (238 people) admitting their backup was on a scrap of paper.
A survey on Bitcoin security from a PhD thesis shows more than half of users back up their private keys on sheets of paper https://t.co/qQvTMR9lDW — Cointelegraph (@Cointelegraph) May 4, 2020
It has been analyzed that the crypto community is long past the days when users had few choices but to write down their keys in capital letters on a notepad.
Prominent figures like Changpeng Zhao (CZ), the CEO of Binance, have suggested that exchanges are better for holding crypto than users retaining the keys themselves.
The survey says that it seems that an old school method of security may be the preferred one, as this could be in response to exchanges being hacked, but users physically storing keys come with its own risks.
As per the report, thousands of BTC have been lost from holders misplacing or destroying equipment containing private keys over the years, amounting to billions of dollars vanished into the ether.
However, even when keys are held securely, backed up, and still “lost”, there can be hope.
Thus, a software engineer was able to recover nearly $300,000 in Bitcoin for a Russian who lost the password to a zip file containing his private keys.
Source: Cointelegraph | Image: Computerworld