Bitcoin Wallet

Since its launch in 2009, bitcoins have grown huge and have even generated new industries to provide various Bitcoin-related services to meet the growing demand. In all this, there’s one ingredient that holds all the vital pieces together – the Bitcoin wallet.

A Bitcoin wallet is a software program that was built to store bitcoins. Each user has a private key for every Bitcoin address that is saved in the Bitcoin wallet of that user. The wallets are the ones responsible for facilitating the procedures in sending and receiving bitcoins, as well as giving the ownership of the balance to the user.

The four primary kinds of wallets are desktop, web, mobile, and hardware. Now, it will depend on the user where he thinks is the most secured place for his Bitcoin wallet.

Desktop wallets are the ones installed on a desktop computer. This enables a user full control over the wallet. Meanwhile, mobile wallets provide utmost convenience that desktop wallets lack. Since it is mobile, a user can transact with bitcoins anywhere, anytime.

Then there’s the web wallet like Blockchain and Coinbase. This allows users to transact using bitcoins from anywhere on any browser or mobile. However, choosing the best web wallet is crucial as it can be a target of attacks since Bitcoin wallets are unregulated and can be vulnerable to hacking activities.

To make it worse, when bitcoins are lost or stolen, they’re gone for good. Because there’s no central bank involved, there’s no way to reclaim your lost bitcoins. Thus, choosing the most secured and reliable Bitcoin wallet is a must as it stores you private keys online.

Hardware wallets, on the other hand, are limited in number. Such devices can store private keys electronically and enable transactions such as payments, but they’re still being developed.