Wallet Guide: How to Protect Your BlockChain
What is a cryptocurrency wallet?
A cryptocurrency wallet is a digital wallet that you can use to store, send and receive various cryptocurrencies. The wallet doesn’t exactly “store” your money as a real-world wallet does. Instead, it saves your public and private keys which in turn helps you send and receive money.
What are public and private keys?
Let’s think of a real world situation before we understand what public and private keys are. Imagine a vending machine. Can anyone and put their money inside the machine right? But, they can’t take out the money because they don’t have the key, they can only put money in the machine. The only person who can take out the money is the owner of the machine who has the key.
In this example, the vending machine is the public address which anyone uses to send money to you. You are the machine owner, and the key that he is carrying is your private key. Using this private key only you can access your money and do what you please with it.
The public key is the address that anyone can use to send you the money, while the private key is what you will use to send money to anyone else. Remember, ONLY you should know what your private key is, otherwise anyone can use your wallet to send your money to any other addresses.
Under no circumstances should you ever lose your private key. Let’s put this in super simple terms. If you lose your private key, then you are SCREWED (yes, uppercase has been used to emphasize the gravity of the situation). You should use at least two different techniques to save and store your private keys. We will discuss these various techniques a little later in the article.
As of right now, let’s discuss the two methods of storage that you can use to store your cryptos, hot storage, and cold storage.
Hot Storage Vs Cold Storage
Let’s understand the basic distinction between the two with a real-world example. Hot storage is like the wallets that you carry around in your pocket. The Cold storage is somewhat akin to your savings bank account. Keep this distinction in mind as we move forward. If you want to use your currency frequently then you must use hot storage. On the other hand, if you want to store your money for a long time then you must use cold storage.
