Trezor

The 3 best Bitcoin wallets for storing your bitcoin (BTC)

chanman · Nov 12, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Having the right Bitcoin wallet is absolutely fundamental to getting involved in Bitcoin.

Without one, you can’t send your purchased Bitcoins to a Bitcoin address. In which case, you can’t buy Bitcoin.

A Bitcoin address is like a bank account, except you hold the keys to that account, whether on your phone, on your desktop or on a hardware wallet.

We talked before about the important factors in choosing a wallet.

In this post, I’m going to tell you about the three best Bitcoin wallets and these are the three that I use personally myself.

I actively use three wallets. This is because I don’t want to put all of my eggs in one basket. I don’t want to have all my coins in one wallet in case something goes wrong with that wallet and I end up losing all of my coins in one go. If that wallet was indeed compromised, I’d rather that I had put some of my holdings elsewhere. It’s a simple way of spreading out the risk.

The 3 Bitcoin wallets I recommend and use myself

Electrum

This was my very first Bitcoin wallet. I did a lot of research at the time before I made the choice to use Electrum. This was back in May 2017 when I made my very first bitcoin purchase. Bitcoin and available Bitcoin information has exploded even since then.

I chose Electrum because the official Bitcoin site (Bitcoin.org) compared it very favourably against other Bitcoin wallets. Check out this wallet comparison on the Bitcoin.org site.

This image is also from the Bitcoin.org site:

Advantages of Electrum are:

It’s lightweight, meaning that you don’t have to sync to the blockchain before using it.
You can also choose fees that you’re willing to spend on sending Bitcoin.
It’s highly recommended by the official Bitcoin.org site
It’s quick to open on your machine and very quick to send a transaction and to receive one
No frills or complications

Disadvantages are:

Because it’s a desktop wallet, it’s not as secure as a hardware wallet like Trezor (more about this below)
Doesn’t look as attractive as Exodus (more about this below)

Overall thoughts about Electrum as a Bitcoin wallet

It’s a great wallet for beginners as it’s easy to install and to setup. You get to learn very quickly the details behind sending and receiving bitcoin.

Exodus Wallet

exodus best bitcoin wallet — A screenshot from the official Exodus website

I started using this wallet after the debacle of the Ethereum node wallet that I was using.

Exodus is a desktop wallet, meaning that you download it to your computer. I wrote about how I set up the Exodus wallet for myself in this post here.

I’m a big fan of this wallet because:

It supports and stores multiple coins (Bitcoin, Ethereum and altcoins). This is a huge plus point in Exodus’s favour. One of the challenges of cryptocurrencies is that each coin (and there could be many that you hold) has its own wallet for storing them in. Say you had holdings in 10 different crypto projects, each with their own coins. The worst case scenario is that you use 10 wallets for 10 different coins. Imagine having to set up 10 wallets, write down 10 different sequences of back up pass phrases?
it’s visually attractive. Look at that screenshot above. Just gorgeous, particularly when you compare it to most other wallets out there.
It has Shapeshift built in, so that you can buy other coins without leaving the wallet to do so. So for example if you had 0.5BTC in your Exodus wallet, you could use Shapeshift and convert 0.1BTC into Ethereum or into Augur or into any of the other coins that Exodus supports storage of.
It’s very easy to send and receive Bitcoin and other currencies. You simply open the ‘wallet’ section of the Exodus wallet, choose the coin you want to send/receive and use the address provided to receive or follow the instructions to send.

Disadvantages of the Exodus wallet

The main one is that it’s transaction fees to send Bitcoin can be higher than you might find with other wallets. Exodus acknowledges this and the higher fees are because they want transactions to be fast. The fees need to be higher than competing transactions to incentivise the miners to process the Exodus transactions faster. (More info on this from Exodus is here.) If fees are important to you, and you send a lot of Bitcoin, then maybe Exodus is not the solution for you in these regards. However, these considerations don’t really bother me as I’m more using Exodus (and my wallets in general) as a place to store and hold crypto long-term.

Overall thoughts about Exodus as a Bitcoin wallet

I strongly recommend considering Exodus.

Download the Exodus wallet from the official site here.

Trezor hardware wallet

Trezor is my first hardware wallet. I wrote about setting up my own Trezor wallet here.

Advantages of the Trezor wallet

It’s a hardware wallet. This immediately makes it safer and more secure than almost every wallet available. There are two types of storage: hot storage and cold storage. Hot storage is any that is connected to the internet to operate. So desktop wallets and mobile wallets are hot storage. Cold storage is where the wallet is not connected to the internet to operate. So hardware wallets (like Trezor, Ledger and Keepkey) and paper wallets are cold storage.

Disadvantages

It’s not free and it’s not that cheap at EUR 89. But that’s a small price to pay for the peace of mind that your Bitcoins that you hold on it aren’t going to get hacked and lost.

Overall thoughts about Trezor as a Bitcoin wallet

Bottom line is I LOVE it. It feels like one of the most secure options out there for Bitcoin storage. Psychologically, I feel that my Bitcoin is safer within my Trezor wallet. That’s not to say that I feel that my other solutions are unsafe, but there’s a feeling of greater relative safety with a hardware wallet and Trezor was the first one I tried and loved and that’s why I’m such fan of it.

Buy the Trezor wallet on the official store here.

Conclusions

If I had to choose one bitcoin wallet to use for storing my bitcoin, it would be Trezor.

Why? Because a hardware wallet is widely acknowledged to be the safest form of storage. It’s safer than a web wallet or a desktop wallet.

However, my ideal bitcoin wallet setup is using multiple wallets that I like

Why? Because it reduces the risk that losing access to one wallet has. It spreads your assets across different wallets so that in the event that you lose one, you haven’t lost everything.

Of the three Bitcoin wallets I’ve recommended above, I would split my holdings by putting the biggest amount of bitcoin into the Trezor hardware wallet, and keep smaller amounts in your Electrum and Exodus wallets.

Tell me about your favourite Bitcoin wallets in the comments below!

Warning against using the full Ethereum node wallet (Lost my ETH!)

chanman · Sep 10, 2017 · 8 Comments

You’ll know from previous posts that I’ve had trouble using the official Ethereum node wallet. This is the full node downloaded from the official Ethereum project website.

The problem is that you can’t see transactions made to or from your wallet until your wallet has synced with the entire blockchain.

This is easier said than done.

Even using decent broadband, I’m always 100,000 blocks behind. The rate that my wallet downloads at is maybe one block per second.

I’ve been trying for weeks to catchup and without success.

It’s time to cut my losses and write this off.

Luckily, I didn’t have that many ETH in there. I’ve only bought two purchases of 0.5 ETH for a total of 1 ETH.

The first time I noticed that I would have a problem was when I bought the second lot of 0.5 ETH. My wallet wouldn’t show receipt of the 0.5 ETH. The node needed to be up to date before showing the transaction.

I tried to send 0.1 to my Exodus wallet and managed to do so. I tried to transfer the remaining 0.4 ETH that I could see in my Ethereum wallet but this didn’t work.

For now, I’m going to use my Exodus wallet for ETH up to an amount of about GBP 500 and use my Trezor wallet for larger amounts.

The only problem I see for the Trezor wallet is that for ETH, it requires an integration with Myetherwallet.com. This extra step isn’t as user-friendly as I would have hoped for with the Trezor wallet. Why can’t I just send my ETH directly to the Trezor, just as I do with Bitcoin?

This makes me want to try out the Ledger Nano S, which from some research is able to receive ETH directly to the device.

Their website currently says shipping dates start on 30th September! They clearly have more demand than supply.

Takeaway

Anyway. the takeaway from this post is to test any wallet first with very small amounts that you could handle losing should the wallet be unusable. Transfer small amounts and practise sending and receiving. If this doesn’t work or the wallet takes years to sync, then at least this way, you won’t have lost large amounts.

Setting up my new Trezor hardware Bitcoin wallet

chanman · Sep 3, 2017 · 1 Comment

I’d heard from quite a few sources that hardware wallets are the way forward in terms of proper security for your coins.

These are a form of cold storage, as opposed to hot storage. Hot storage is anything where your private keys are connected to the internet or your computer.

Cold storage is what you want for any large holdings of Bitcoin and other supported coins. Large is whatever amount you would feel sick losing. In my previous post, we saw how a guy lost USD 12,000 of Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH) on his Exodus wallet. This is a lovely looking wallet but it is a hot wallet. You shouldn’t really have that much on there, or any other hot wallet for that matter.

So in the world of hardware wallets, there are three main options:

Keepkey looks great but less durable in case of dropping it. Currently USD 99.

Ledger Nano S is the cheapest at EUR 69.

Trezor is around EUR 89.

So they’re all roughly the same price and I will try them all out at some point.

For now, I went with a Trezor. I bought one off Amazon.

Unboxing the Trezor wallet

This is what it looks:

It’s important to get some information on how to set it up properly. I highly recommend the Trezor set up videos from CoinSutra – seriously useful! I’ve listed the 3 videos below:

Setting it up does take some time. You want to make sure that you get it right, so you don’t want to rush this step.

The most important thing to write down your recovery seed of 24 words.

Write these 24 words down very carefully. DO NOT RUSH!

Once you’ve set up your Trezor wallet, I highly recommend that you don’t transfer Bitcoins into it yet.

Make sure that you can recover your wallet first.

To start this process, watch the video below from Coinsutra about how to wipe your Trezor wallet first.

Now that you’ve wiped your Trezor wallet, watch the next video by Coinsutra to go through the recovery process. You’ve basically now got a new wallet. You’re trying to restore the wallet you just created on a now wiped Trezor wallet.

IMPORTANT: DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP

Practising recovery is ESSENTIAL. You don’t want to have Bitcoins on your wallet and not be able to know that you can recover this wallet in case of loss.

You want to know that you wrote down the recovery seed properly.

You want to have the peace of mind that it all works before committing Bitcoins and other coins to it.

It’s so easy to skip because you just want to get on with the exciting stuff but please do not rush and skip this.

As a cautionary note, I failed to recover my wallet twice in four attempts. It’s easy to rush and get things wrong.

But I got there in the end. And now I have a Trezor hardware wallet!

I do feel it’s a bit more secure than having a wallet on my desktop. I suppose only because I trust that this is a more secure storage system, because everyone in the community says so. There’s an element of trust here but sometimes you do have to do your own research and make a judgement based on risk and reward.

Finally, like I said in my last post, do not put all your eggs in one basket. Only put what you’d be comfortable losing onto your hardware wallet.

As your holdings grow, you will need additional hardware wallets for peace of mind.

Improvements I would make to the Trezor experience

Longer cable

I would make the USB cable that comes with it longer. It’s only about 5 inches and isn’t that useful as it’s got to be connected to your computer the whole time. Whilst it’s connected, you have to hold it in one hand to see what’s going on on the screen. If it was 12 inches, that would be much more user-friendly.

More recovery seed cards

These are really useful actually. They have numbers and lines and make your recording of your recovery seeds nice and neat and easy to refer to. Better than a piece of paper. You get two in the pack as default. I wanted to make two copies of the seed but I messed up copying the second. Doh. Three or four as default would be perfect.

Let me know your experiences with hardware wallets like Trezor are in the comments below! Any questions too!