The term, “be your own bank” concerning cryptocurrencies come with so many responsibilities. If your bank gets robbed and a lot of money is being stolen, well, it doesn’t concern you. The bank bears the loss, all of it. Your account should read the same figures it displays before the attack.
Now that you control your own money, the responsibility of protecting it from theft or any attack that can make you lose all of you asset or investment depends on you. You want to put in place all measures to make sure it’s hiding from attackers.
We discuss best practices to keeping your BTC or another cryptocurrency safe in this guide. Following these prescribed ways gives you some assurance that your money is safe from intruders, most especially those over the internet.
Hardware Wallets
A hardware wallet is a particular type of wallet that stores private keys in an encrypted device. There are quite a number of them, but the Ledger, Trezor, and Keepkey are the most popular ones of them all. There are also few more like the CoolWallet and BitLox.
Hardware wallets secure your cryptocurrencies in the sense that its mnemonic phrase which is required to access your cryptocurrencies are generated and accessed through the device. Though the device can be accessed through a PC or a mobile device, data from the hardware wallet cannot be copied to those devices, keeping your mnemonic phrase safe and inaccessible to unauthorized users.
With a small screen which usually comes with these hardware wallets, hardware wallet owners can write down their phrases on a piece of paper and keep in a safe and secure place that can’t be accessed by anyone else.
Paper Wallets
Though paper wallets are generated from platforms on the web, if generated from the right source can be a very safe form of storing your Bitcoins or any other cryptocurrency.
Popular Bitcoin Wallet Address Generators include BitAddress, BitcoinPaperWallet, and WalletGenerator. These applications automatically generate Bitcoin addresses and private keys and make them available to be printed on paper. Because these applications are clients based, their developers are not aware of addresses/private keys generated through the application.
A better option for a paper wallet is the CryptoHex wallet. This is an indestructible way to back up your cryptocurrencies. Unlike your keys/phrases being printed paper, you can have it written/punched on a metal. This way, the problem associated with having your cryptocurrencies on paper, like it getting burnt, or ink fading out doesn’t affect you. Cryptohex may be a great solution to back up your BTC private keys.
Web Wallets
With web wallets, you can access your cryptocurrencies through a web browser over the internet. It’s important to note that you shouldn’t have too much that you can afford to lose in there as these type of wallets are easy to hack or exploit. You can keep as much as you use for your day-to-day transactions.
Web Wallets like Rahakott and BitcoinWallet are best examples of the web address generators for Bitcoins. You can efficiently use these wallets to send and receive Bitcoins from others. This is great for cryptocurrency beginners, and as time goes on, they can upgrade into a much safer wallet option.
Security on web wallets is implemented using email address verifications or two-factor authentications. So your Bitcoins are as safe as how you keep your email address’ password hard to guess or your device on which the google authentication app secured.
Conclusion
The wallet you choose depends on how much you have to invest in the safety of your digital assets. The total cost of hardware wallets may be expensive depending on your residing country, but it’s worth every cent if you have some few thousands of dollars of cryptocurrencies in storage.
