We covered a few questions so far. By now you should be able to respond easily what crypto you want to store, how you want to use your stored crypto in the near future and how much money in fiat you hold in crypto.
If you have missed the previous blog posts, here they are:
Part 1 - How to store your Crypto is available here: https://steemit.com/sct/@bitcoindelight/how-to-store-your-crypto
Part 2 - First question to ask yourself: https://steemit.com/sct/@bitcoindelight/how-to-store-your-crypto-part-2
Part 3 - Question #2 to ask yourself: https://steemit.com/sct/@bitcoindelight/how-to-store-your-crypto-part-3
Part 4 – Question #3 How to store your crypto: https://steemit.com/sct/@bitcoindelight/part-4-how-to-store-your-crypto
Let us step up our example a little bit. Imagine you want a bitcoin wallet to hold Bitcoin long term. Chances are high that all those marketing campaigns have been successful and you are aware of the existence of hardware wallets as well. The most common one these days seems to be the Ledger device. I admit I bought a Ledger wallet as well to see what it is like to use.
However, does a hardware wallet really provide better security than a software wallet?
In comparison to a software wallet, the hardware wallet comes as a piece of hardware promising you more ‘security’ due to handling the cryptocurrency key management on a separate device. It is basically just this that no malicious software can target your software-based crypto wallet. These days a ledger will show any crypto-related address on the Ledger device before the user can approve a transaction. But that's pretty much it. The cheapest Ledger device – the Nano S is currently priced with $109 Australian Dollars. That is not necessarily cheap but let us stick to our example in this case.
So you might ask is it worth to spend this money to buy such a device? Personally, I am not using my Ledger Nano anymore because I discovered a few no go’s and prefer to use a software wallet instead. I discovered that most cases where people lost their Bitcoin due to hacks or phishing were because they surfed on some dodgy websites or got baited by some websites to click on links they shouldn’t check out at all. So the main problem was not necessarily a bug in the software wallet which lead to losing their crypto it was a reckless browsing behavior that made them vulnerable.
So lesson number 1 if you want to keep your software crypto wallet as secure as possible – don’t browse dodgy stuff on the web with the machine you have installed your crypto wallet on.
Next part I will tell you 3 additional things why I decided to stick with a software wallet!
Thumbnail by Erica Nilsson on Unsplash