Glossary
Cold storage
Holding crypto private keys on a device that has never touched the internet — the only meaningful protection against remote theft.
Cold storage means keeping the private keys to your crypto on a device that is not connected to any network. The opposite is hot storage — a wallet on a phone, browser extension, or exchange that's reachable from the internet.
The point of cold storage isn't paranoia; it's eliminating a class of attack. A key that has never been on an online device cannot be exfiltrated remotely. The attacker has to physically get to it. That single property changes the threat model from "anyone on the internet" to "anyone in your house with the seed phrase," which is many orders of magnitude smaller.
Practical implementations range from a hardware wallet (a small purpose-built device that signs transactions offline) to a metal-stamped seed phrase in a safe. Both work; both fail if you lose the recovery phrase or hand it to a scammer over the phone. Cold storage is a primitive that pairs only with good operational discipline — never type the seed into a computer, never photograph it, never store it in a password manager.