Store Your Bitcoin as Securely as Possible. Getting into bitcoin and worried about making sure it’s safe and secure? Or have been holding onto some bitcoin for years and want to upgrade your storage setup? Here are the best ways to keep your bitcoin as secure as possible.
Bitcoin Wallets
The key thing to understand the way Bitcoin Wsllets work is that no matter what you do, you would actually not be storing the bitcoin itself, because a bitcoin is an encrypted address on the blockchain, not an object. And you own a unique key that unlocks a specific bitcoin location, and that’s needed to be protecting at all times by storing a bitcoin in a wallet.
There are a few different ways to store your bitcoin. These ways depend on how secure you want to be and how much you plan to use it regularly.
Hardware Wallet:
It’s easy to store your bitcoin and other cryptocurrency in a digital wallet online, or locally on your computer or smartphone. But leaving a bitcoin in public view can disclose you up to attacks from hackers and phishing scams. That’s the reason the best option is a hardware wallet to store your bitcoin offline.
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Most hardware wallets are like USB drives able to be easily connected to a computer. These wallets use a PIN number for security, along a secondary password “seed” if you forget the PIN. In case you forget both passwords you are pretty much screwed, so it might be work writing the seed down somewhere safe and offline.
Another biggest drawback to a hardware wallet is that if you lose once you can not recover the bitcoin. So don’t forget to create at least one backup on another encrypted storage device.
As for a specific model, there are plenty of solid options for less than $100. Trezor or the Ledger Nano S is recommended by the experts.
Hardware wallets can also make the process of actually spending your bitcoin a much difficult. So keep a small amount of bitcoin in a digital wallet like Mycelium Wallet designed to work well with offline storage devices.
Want to keep your bitcoin offline but don’t want to deal with a hardware wallet? Consider a paper wallet instead. It’s really just a piece of paper with your public and private keys printed on it, and can be used to access your bitcoin.
In case you don’t plan on touching your bitcoin for a while, a paper wallet is a best option. But make sure you put your paper wallet somewhere safe and don’t forget where it is.
