I get asked what is the safest bitcoin wallet (mobile) for securing your bitcoin and alt coins, so I decided to make an article about it.
Security is a paramount concern of many people, so let’s explain why it should be with you.
Thinking of using a phone based wallet?
Think AGAIN before you get owned.
What’s the Safest Bitcoin Wallet for You?
Let me start off with another question for you to consider.
Why limit yourself to one bitcoin wallet?
There are various scenarios here to satisfy and also ask yourself do you fit into the profile of someone who needs paramount security.
Many people out there are late to the party with bitcoin and cryptocurrency, so they likely bought some, and it may have gone up, but not to life changing levels. They likely have those crypto coins in a web based wallet located with one or more of the big online exhanges.
Some of these online exchanges are names like Coinbase, Kraken, Bitfinex, Poloniex, CEX.io, and many many more. Some of these require you to use bank transfer to convert regular currency to cryptocurrency, while some may allow credit/debit/bank account direct transfer.
If you don’t have huge assets, and better yet if they are spread out amongst several exchanges, then maybe you aren’t ready for a hardware based secure wallet yet. While there is always the Mt Gox scenario, in which a well known online exchange was hacked and coinage was stolen, the other services learned from that and upped their security.
You see, the online exchanges store YOUR crypto keys, and if they are hacked, you are hacked.
That being said, you have to consider numbers of scale, probability, and the likelihood that in the increased security regime since Mt Gox, that you would suffer a huge loss through your chosen online exchange.
I am not trying to downplay security, but merely trying to get you to assess where you stand on the issue.
What About Government Snooping?
Another consideration for increased security by taking your coins offline are to keep your holdings off the exchange records which can be handed over to government tax authorities.
The exchanges are businesses that must be licensed and operate within their geographical locale, so if the government presiding over the exchange demands such records, they may have to comply.
In countries like the US, this usually would come after a court order, but in some countries it would be either immediate or the police or military would be dispatched to arrest the company management if they don’t comply.
So, if you want to keep under government tax radar, you might also want to go with offline storage. They CAN usually obtain records of your bank transfers from when you transferred fiat currency into cryptocurrency, unless you ha e some online income source that pays in cryptocurrency and doesn’t report earnings.
There are other factors here, like the fact that your transactions and coins are actually always online in the blockchain that defines the particular currency, but your ownership of them is governed by your private keys, and if your wallet and keys are not on the web exchanges, they aren’t so visible to the governments.
The flip side of all this is if you really don’t have such huge holdings that it presents a hacker target or a tax liability, and the web wallets are more convenient for sending coins to different addresses for converting to other currencies or for payments for goods and services.
So, this is why you have to see where YOU stand on the convenience vs security scale.
If you need convenience and the good security that the good online exchanges offer, then you should open an account with them and fund it to get started. You can always send your coins to another wallet address on another exchange, or to a hardware bitcoin wallet.
What if I need the Security of a High Roller?
If you need the higher security of a tax dodger or high roller who might be the target of an attack to steal cryptocurrency, then you might want to get yourself a bitcoin cold storage device and learn how to store bitcoin on usb. A bitcoin usb wallet… well, actually it would be a device that can hold a variety of different coins, making it a safest bitcoin wallet and best cryptocurrency wallet in our book, is usually a software program that resides on a phone or other device, like a computer. It could be the safest bitcoin wallet for you if you need that level of security.
I would steer clear of phone based wallets. Listen to John Mcafee on this.
If you can truly secure your computer and turn it off when not in use, perhaps that can be a good choice for a secure bitcoin cold storage device.
I would go one step further and get a bitcoin usb wallet that is secure even if lost or stolen.
Think about this, if you have a large cache of bitcoin or cryptocurrency, then maybe it’s time to take some of that offline and keep it safe from hackers.
Ya think?
A guy connected his device to public wifi and was robbed of a lot of bitcoin.
This happens more often than you think, so with these cryptocurrency value skyrocketing, maybe you need to learn how to store bitcoin on usb and then sleeping at night can be a whole lot more peaceful.
M’kay?
This bitcoin cold storage device, which is really a bitcoin usb wallet, has multi-currency support and features too numerous to list here, so just head on over to take a look at how that can very well be the safest bitcoin wallet that you may find. If you can;’t bring yourself to trust a web wallet, then this may be your thing.
The current list of supported cryptos for this device: (as of November, 2017)
BTC – Bitcoin
ETH/ETC – Ethereum/Ethereum Classic
XRP – Ripple
LTC – Litecoin
DOGE – Dogecoin
ZEC – Zcash (Z-addresses not supported)
DASH – Dash
STRAT – Stratis
(coming soon) XMR – Monero
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