How to secure your Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple and other alt coins? "Cold Wallets"

In the world of crypto currencies, you, as a buyer or day trader are your own bank. What does this mean? The fact that in the world of digital coins you are your own bank means that the security provisions of your money fall upon you. There is no intermediary (the traditional bank) that implements any security measures to protect your money.

Read the article to the "Important Considerations"part!

How to protect your Bitcoin, Ether, Ripple or any other alt coin?  The safest way to do this is to set up a Cold Wallet. The easiest way to define a cold wallet is like a wallet that has no internet connection. These cold wallets can be hardware devices like the Trezor, or simply a sheet of paper where you print your public and private keys in plain text format and optionally as QR codes.

Although the exchange or the site where you have decided to buy your crypto coins will provide you with a wallet to store them, you should keep in mind that this wallet is stored on a server that is, at the end of the day, connected to the Internet and exposed to hacking, which puts at risk all the wallets of the users of this site.

What's in a cold wallet?
Usually a cold wallet must have the private and public key pair in text format, and optionally it can also have them in QR code format.

Example of a Bitcoin cold wallet 

 How to generate a cold wallet?
Whenever you acquire a crypto currency, whether it is Bitcoin, Ethereum, Ripple, NEM, or Ethereum tokens such as RCN, ANT and others, you should investigate if there are cold wallets to store them. Afterwards, you should investigate if this cold wallet can be generated without having to be connected to the internet. The process is usually the following:

    -You locate the site that provides the cold wallet, for example MyEtherWallet provides cold wallets for Ethereum and its related tokens.
    -You enter the page where the wallet is generated.
    -Then you can choose to save the web page in your computer or run it from the window that you already have opened in your browser, what you must do is to disconnect the computer from the Internet for a moment.
    -Then procede to generate your electronic wallet following the instructions given to you.
   - Save (in a very safe place, either on a USB or computer not connected to the internet) or print (or both) the generated file.
    - Finally, from your hot wallet (the one you have connected to the internet or in an exchange website) you transfer the coins to the cold wallet.

How do I use cold wallet if it is not connected to the Internet?
 To use your cold wallet and use the funds stored in it you must import the pair of keys, public and private in some program, website or electronic wallet with the ability to import keys, once you have your keys imported you can see the balance of your wallet and use the coins as you wish.

Another example of cold wallet, also called paper wallet.

Important Considerations

  - No one but you should have access to your cold wallet.
  - If you decide not to print it and prefer to save it as a PDF or Image you should not have it stored on the same computer that you use to surf the Internet.
  - When you go to transfer your coins to the cold wallet first send a small amount and then check the cold wallet balance using ONLY the public key. There are many online services for each currency crypto that allow you to see the balance of a portfolio using your public key, if you see that your portfolio already reflects the balance of the first shipment you can send the rest.
- Once you have imported the pair of keys from your cold wallet into an application or website you should consider that cold wallet is no longer secure, if you are not going to have all the funds stored in it the best thing is to generate a new cold wallet and transfer to it the funds you do not plan to use.

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator