Topic: How many crypto wallets do you own? - page 3. (Read 1036 times)

 I think it's a good idea to have multiple wallets and addresses and to take all necessary precautions to secure your cryptocurrency assets.

 It may seem like overkill to some, but when it comes to your hard-earned money, it's always better to be safe than sorry.   in fact, many experts recommend diversifying your cryptocurrency holdings across multiple wallets and exchanges to reduce the risk of losing all your assets in case of a hack or security breach

This does not make sense how do you fear losing a cold wallet when it is protected from a lot of the reasons people lose their Bitcoin? Hot wallets are easier to attack and easier to lose money. I think you should read what each term means because I think you are confused what they mean.

I don't really like cold wallets because I'm afraid I will lose them.
I mostly use hot wallets, and I have a lot of them. It's always good to have a new wallet to receive or send money because this way your identity and previous transactions would be hidden.

Since we are talking about crypto wallet not just Bitcoin then I have a couple of wallets that I use.
For example the one that I used for storing my crypto for a long term, and the wallet that I use for small transactions or regular transactions.
I also have some wallet for different plat forms.

All private keys should be generated off line even if you later connect to the internet but I think hardware wallets are safer because the private key or pin is never exposed to the computer that it connects to. I think hardware wallets are the future and I hope their price goes down so they become more accessible.

I somewhat agree. At best, one wallet for your "savings" that is offline and protected, another that is used for everyday daily spending. Both self-custody wallets of course. Any more wallets than that and I think that's a recipe for getting things confused. I don't really see what the purpose of having more than one or two would be, it's not like it's one address per wallet!

I own a couple of wallets and I try to divide my Bitcoin up so that if one was stolen the rest of my Bitcoin would not be stolen. All of the wallets are paper wallets or hardware wallets. I really like hardware wallets and might purchase more so that I can still log in and check the balance and send transactions when needed without worrying about the security of my device.

I can see why you would need at least 3 wallets.

One wallet would have most of your savings, in cold storage.

Another wallet would be a hot wallet, able to move coins around easily on your laptop.

And a third, mobile wallet, for lightning stuff.

I think that's the optimum minimum amount of wallets today.

These are the cases of people who holds big number of bitcoins. I personally have one, and that is more than enough for me and I never needed anything more.

I understand that some people may want to have multiple because they have a ton of money and they want to spread it around so that if they can't access to one, they are not out of all of their money but just a part of it, but as someone who doesn't even have that much, I could simply put it on any exchange and if something happens to it, it wouldn't be too much money to screw up my life, it would be very much normal, I don't have many and don't need multiple wallets.

The point isn't how many wallets one has, but rather the level of security expected, as the OP here said.


He talks more about bitcoin, meaning that the wallet needed is enough to choose Electrum and when other considerations for storage of assets other than bitcoin, then just choose one more from the source that suits the user, suggesting multiple wallets will also confuse the OP. I'm sure he and others prefer to pick one or two of the safest wallets to use on a regular basis.

You can always add a passphrase to the normal set of words, and you simply don't print the passphrase there.

That means that anyone can see the seed words but it won't work because they're lacking your passphrase.

You could have multiple copies of it stored anywhere, relatively safely.

You can store all your private keys in one paper and on one location in order to less complicate things but this won't make sense at all once someone finds it because no matter how many wallets you have all of them are still going to be emptied. Two wallets must be ideal for all of us because I am also doing this.

One is strictly for storing Bitcoins and the other is an Ethereum wallet which supports Erc20 tokens and other kinds of altcoins and tokens. I do this because I found ETH wallets less secure, that's why I only keep less money on them. I also trust Bitcoin more in terms of profitability and stability, I mean it's unlikely to turn into a scam due to its old age.

I used to use several wallets and exchanges, it was inconvenient and tedious. Now I understand how actually unsafe it was.
Now I use only one non-custodial Ownr wallet and plan to buy a hardware wallet in the future.
It seems to me that having multiple wallets is much worse just because you can mix up passwords or seed-phrases. It's just going to make your life harder.

In my opinion, having multiple bitcoin wallets is a very reasonable precaution.

There is a very small (but non-zero probability) that another user will randomly choose a Seed - Phrase absolutely identical to your Seed - Phrase. This is almost unbelievable, but possible event. In this case, you will lose all your Bitcoins.

However, this precaution will be completely unnecessary if you lose control of all the Seeds - Phrases of your wallets.  

Therefore, it seems appropriate to store the recorded Seed - Phrases from different wallets in different places.  

If your Seed - Phrases are encrypted, then it seems appropriate to use a separate encryption method for each Seed - Phrases.

Forgetting private key is not something we pray to happen to us but they have been cases where private key or secret phrase has been forgotten or lost, I think that's what Op is referring to. You never can tell what's going to happen tomorrow, you might be doing fine today and tomorrow be on the street same also applies to your secret phrase the place where you kept the private key may be okay today and tomorrow it might become one of the most vunerable place. You just can't tell what the future holds. 

Everything has advantage and disadvantage. Personally I would not advise anyone to have multiple wallet instead one is okay with open source wallet and well secured one as that. If you have multiple Wallets there is no way you not do mistake login passwords or mis-keeping the keys in different places. In fact having multiple Wallets is more dangerous than having one wallet. You are afraid of losing all your coin in one wallet. But single wallet is more preferable because private key, password and seed phrase are all one so there is no way you mistyped one for another. And that is why you have to security concern and be vigilant in whatever you do with your wallet.  But you can at least have like two wallets. One for hodling and the other for expenses

I think the best way is to have multiple different wallets set up to do different things from long-term savings to spending in person.

- Air-gapped hardware device for long term savings. Maybe use a multisig setup for this. It should be relatively difficult to access to protect if from bad actors and make it difficult for you to spend it easily. I personally use a SeedSigner and a ColdCard for my air-gapped devices.
 
- Connected hardware device for short term savings and online spending (when I am ready to spend). This will likely be a ColdCard that I connect directly to my computer to sign transactions. No crazy security processes. Just plug, sign, and send.

- Software wallets: I only use Sparrow wallet on my desktop but I have electrum because it's a great wallet as well but I can CoinJoin with Sparrow and send the CoinJoined coins to one of my hardware devices after a certain number of mixes. I cannot recommend Sparrow enough.

- Mobile Wallets: I use blue wallet for most on-chain transactions because I like that I can easily create different accounts and I have manual control of the miner fee and I can connect to my own node. It's the best mobile wallet that I have used but I know that there are a bunch of other good ones like Green, Nunchuk, and more.

- Lightning wallets: I use Muun, Phoenix, Breez, Wallet Of Satoshi, and Zeus. I use each one for different things.
 I like Muun the most but it is not compatible with Nostr (here's my npub if you wanna connect: npub1ftrnkvl0hdud65yacyvcn6sx2w7lfztdp2957wp344dcc9s3yf8qm56ykf )  and while I like Phoenix, it's not quite as frictionless as Muun. I really like the delete wallet feature on Muun so I can create a new wallet after I am done with an experiment or something. Breez is great for anyone who runs a store but I have not used it much since I don't have a store to run. I think it will be really useful for onboarding new merchants but I think we are a long way from that. Wallet of Satoshi is what I use to receive zaps on Nostr and it works but I don't like that it's a custodial app so I do whatever I can to direct people to other wallets. Finally, I use Zeus for all of my LN experiments to actually send through my node.  When the time comes to spend in person, I will use any combination of these wallets to receive and send on lightning.

Overall, that makes about 8 wallets that I use on the regular but I have plans to experiment with even more in the future.

Honestly, if I knew what I know now when I started I wouldn't own more than two different wallets. Owning more wallets isn't a status symbol in anyway and I like to keep it simple. Freewallet was one of the first wallets I had before I moved to Blockchain wallet, and then to more others. I later learnt that Freewallet went rogue. There was a day I tried logging in to assess the few cryptos I had on that wallet but couldn't. At that time there were many people who also complained of being locked out of their wallets. It was a common complaint then.

First of all, is to make it clear the difference between a wallet and an address because looks like for OP those two terms are the same things.

The bitcoins are held in bitcoin address, and the bitcoin address can be imported into the wallets by the private key. Some wallets have a seed that is used to generate addresses and to provide a backup to the users, but is important to understand that users can have the same address in different wallets, but for security reasons, this is not recommended.

I have several wallets and these are one of these that I use most.
1. Trust wallet
2. Metamask
3. Zerion wallet etc
And in future I want to use more