Software wallet or hardware wallet? – Part 5 How to store your crypto
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
"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."
Unfortunately, more often than not, that is exactly why people lose money from their bank accounts, PayPal accounts, Crypto wallets, and other such online places. Their accounts are not hacked, but rather access to them is given quite freely to the "robber" by clicking on phishing links, or the like. Sadly, no matter how often they are told not to fall for such scams, what to avoid, and so on, some people just never learn until it is too late, and even then some will have the audacity to try and blame the system rather than accept any responsibility themselves. I even know people who still think that the very poor built-in security of Windows is enough to protect them from viruses, malware, hacker attacks, etc. Quite sad, really!
Thanks for taking the time to write your comment @starworld. Much appreciated and well written! That is something I can confirm and I have made the same experiences when talking to people who lost access to wallets, online accounts, etc.