The bitcoin network is an extremely secure and powerful system that will ensure the safety and anonymity of your coin ownership. But, the computers, servers and other areas where you actually store these coins aren’t safe at all. This is the reason why you need to be very careful with your bitcoin and how to store them. If someone gets inside your email account, computer or mobile device, he shouldn’t be able to steal your cryptocurrencies under any circumstances. You especially need to view these famous cryptocurrency exchanges and their “safe” wallets with some healthy suspicion. The reason is that these exchanges have been hacked before and people have lost their bitcoins, therefore, you need to be smart about. Knowing which cryptocurrency wallets are good to use will help you if you plan to be in the cryptocurrency world for a long time.
The first and foremost step is that never keep your bitcoins online. It is an extreme risk that nobody should be taking and servers are compromised every now and then. So, you need to transfer your accumulated long-term bitcoins to a secure location and save their private keys.
But how do you do that?
Keeping your bitcoin offline is also called using cold storage to keep your coins. There are different ways through which you can keep your coin data offline so that no one can lay their hands on it. Here are just a few:
Paper Wallets
A paper wallet is a specially made document that contains all the data to make a wallet of keys. These documents are then stored physically stored offline for security purposes. Paper wallets are very popular among the crypto community.
Hardware Wallets
Hardware wallets are a great way to keep your bitcoin offline until needed at the right moment. They are like high-tech USBs that store the private key data and you can simply plug them into your system to do the transfer when needed. They are considered one of the safest ways to hold bitcoins in the longer run.
Mobile Wallets
Mobile wallets are generally frowned upon for storing a large number of bitcoins. While there are a number of wallets like Electrum, etc that claim that their wallets store keys offline and they can be set up on a mobile, you should view their claim with a sense of realistic skepticism and try to protect your long-term earnings offline under your own monitoring.
