Hello Steemians,
yesterday night i did some research on Ethereum wallets, I want to share with you guys.
Since I bought some ERC-20 tokens (tokens running on Ethereum blockchain) I needed a Wallet which could handle the Tokens easily.
I'm right at the beginning of my "crypto journey" so in case you got recommendations or I got something wrong please do let me know in the comment section below.
First the cold storage
Concerning safety a cold storage device ( meaning offline Wallets on some type of USB ) such as:
Ledger Nano S for around 85€ amazon
Trezor for about 130€ amazon
is by far the safest way to store your ETH as well as the mayor coins. Hereby the Trezor supports a few more ERC-20 tokens than the Ledger. By supporting I mean that you actually can see value to transfer on the software and/or of the cold storage itself. They do though support all ERC-20 tokens in combination with myetherwallet which leads to a vulnerability in my opinion by connecting your cold storage to myetherwallet.
Second the light wallets
A light wallet is a online wallet handling your private keys. There are so many out there and so many being already hacked that I am just afraid of online wallets. Just to name two examples:
Parity
is an awesome online Ethereum wallet with a shit load of cool features. It was unfortunately being hacked recently. The attackers stole 150.000ETH worth 30million dollars "see for yourself". Though there have been only three whales hacked and they assure that they have fixed the problem. I think for the time being it is hard to trust in that Platform.Exodus
is an multi-signature app which has a outstanding user interface and it can handle very much coins and tokens. It offers a nice portfolio overview as well. This would be exactly what I have been looking for If it wouldn't have been hacked too. And some friends of mine told me about some usage bugs...Third desktop wallets
These are Wallets which can be downloaded to your computer. Not as save as cold storage but better than online wallets.
The two leading and official wallets are:
Mist and myetherwallet
. Those have not being hacked as far as I know and If somebody gets your keys It would be a lag of security on your computer so basically your fault not like online wallets or exchanges, were you have to trust in the creators (even more) for the safety of your money.OK so far so good. I like Mist BUT you have to download the whole chain witch is in full size of 75GB adding 150mb a month (there are different implementations around 10 to 25 GB out there "geth / --fast") a 2017 chaindata folder should be around 30GB actual size. This is an Issue for example on a modern Notebook. Furthermore if it was about downloading the chain once ... OK but concerning updates it kind of sucks. Me personally, I am six month of the year in Germany and six in Tanzania. It is almost impossible to get that size in Tanzania.
So now myetherwallet. This is basically and online wallet where you have the option to download it to your computer. Go to myetherwallet.com than open the help tab go to "How do I run MEW offline / locally?" and follow instructions. My choice for the time being! you don't need to get the whole Blockchain it supports all ERC-20 tokens and hadn't been hacked so far.
Conclusion
I am using the myetherwallet for now as my stock on Ether is kind of low. When it grows or I reinvest in either Ether or the ERC-20 tokens I will definitely get a cold storage device. Hopefully Trezor and/or Legder will do some updates up to that time so I can use all ERC-20 tokens with ease as well as more coins.