How can I secure my wallet ? - How to Secure Bitcoin Account
There are several ways to make your bitcoin wallet more secure:
Since multiple signatures are needed before funds can be spent, the additional signatures could come from, say, a business partner, your significant other, or even from a second device which you own, to add a second factor to spending your coins.
If
you are too nervous to store your bitcoin keys digitally, for fear that
they may be stolen by hackers, there is another option: ‘cold storage’.
Cold storage wallets store private bitcoin keys offline, so that they can’t be stolen by someone else on the Internet.
It’s a good idea to use cold storage for the bulk of your bitcoin fortune, and transfer just a little to separate bitcoin addresses in a ‘hot’ wallet with an Internet connection, making it easy to spend.
That way, even if your mobile phone is lost, or the hot wallet on your notebook PC is erased during a hard drive crash, only a small amount of bitcoin cash is at risk.
Many software bitcoin wallets feature a cold storage option. Or, you could go completely analogue, and simply use paper wallets for offline storage.
Encrypt it :
One way to protect your wallet from prying eyes is to encrypt it with a strong password. This makes it difficult to access your wallet, but not impossible. If your computer is compromised by malware, thieves could log your keystrokes to find your password.Back it up :
If you have your private keys stored in one wallet, but you mislay that wallet or it gets corrupted, you will lose your keys. Backing up your wallet makes a copy of your private keys, but it's important to back up your whole wallet. Some addresses are used to store change from transactions, and may not be shown to you by default. Back up the whole wallet in several different places, and keep them safe from prying eyes.Use multisig :
The number of services which support multi-signature transactions is increasing. Multi-signature addresses allow multiple parties to partially seed an address with a public key. When someone wants to spend some of the bitcoins, they need some of these people to sign their transaction in addition to themselves. The required number of signatures is agreed at the start when people create the address.Since multiple signatures are needed before funds can be spent, the additional signatures could come from, say, a business partner, your significant other, or even from a second device which you own, to add a second factor to spending your coins.
Take it offline
Cold storage wallets store private bitcoin keys offline, so that they can’t be stolen by someone else on the Internet.
It’s a good idea to use cold storage for the bulk of your bitcoin fortune, and transfer just a little to separate bitcoin addresses in a ‘hot’ wallet with an Internet connection, making it easy to spend.
That way, even if your mobile phone is lost, or the hot wallet on your notebook PC is erased during a hard drive crash, only a small amount of bitcoin cash is at risk.
Many software bitcoin wallets feature a cold storage option. Or, you could go completely analogue, and simply use paper wallets for offline storage.
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