How to Handle Your Coins with Care
The ultimate rule of crypto is this: Hold your own money and hold it wisely, with care. Assume you are a pirate at sea with your chest of gold. If it spills overboard, or rather if you send your crypto to the wrong address or you forget the passcode, it’s lost forever in the infinite ocean of the internet. The following is a list of different options I’d recommend to the casual investor:
Hardware Wallets
This is the most technical of all the options on the list. It’s still pretty simple, and highly secure. Essentially hardware wallets are advanced flash drives that plug into your computer’s USB port. Once you send your choice coins to the wallet, you can unplug the drive and store it in a safe, off the internet, physically untouchable, digitally unreachable. My recommended wallet is trezor.io. There is also a company called Ledger that people like. NOTE: Ledger’s payment processing system recently got hacked giving out personal information, not crypto.
Cell Phone apps
Cell phone apps are the next best option. being more secure in general nowadays than the common household computer. Thanks to biometrics, especially.
Simply, there are too many cell phone app wallets to review, so you can do your own research based on download counts and ratings, but I know Mycellium Wallet for bitcoin only from my past as well as Trust Wallet are both well respected in the community.
Cash App is cool and fun now for small balances and the easiest way to buy, send, and receive.
For defi, Coinbase has a wallet now. As does Crypto.com. But I find the Argent Wallet to be extra nice for DeFi.
I highly recommend Cake Wallet for my Monero people. It’s perfectly simple, fluid, and community-driven.
My Grin pals can use this and run a full mobile node.
Computer Wallets
One can simply go to Bitcoin Core for the base bitcoin wallet.
Likewise, base wallets are available for Litecoin and Monero. Grin, once more.
To operate Ethereum on your computer, the best thing to do is to stake it. If that’s not your thing, check out My Ether Wallet or Metamask.
Interest Bearing Accounts
Blockfi, Crypto.com, Coinbase all can offer you some sort of return on some of your assets. Just know that if they are holding them and paying you interest, then you are not holding them and that comes with extra risk sets that you will have to weight. Blockfi, for example, claims to be storing 95% of their deposits securely, with instutional grade support via the Winklevoss’ Gemini company.
Exchanges
Only when you want to sell, should your coins be on an exchange like binance, coinbase, etc for too long. But why would you if sell you’re holding quality investments??
