Crypto wallets allow us to interact with blockchains and you're going to need one if you are to invest in or use a blockchain and here are the best types of wallets for you to use i'm going to explain them and who they are for throughout this video you have hardware wallets like ledger and trezor links to everything are in the description including you know where to get them and also tutorials and everything like that you also have software wallets like coinbase wallet or trustwallet you can download these on your phone or on your computer then you have blockchain specific wallets each and every blockchain will have its own wallet of course so yo roy for cadano avalanche wallet for avalanche polygon wallet for polygon then you have paper wallets as well this is where you literally write down the passwords and keys to those wallets there's some pros and cons to this which i'll go through throughout so really.
There are three main types of wallets and they have different use cases and you might want to use all three of them in tandem the first type are software wallets every single time that you want to send transactions or interact with a blockchain in any way you're going to have to use some sort of application that's what these are they're called hot wallets or online wallets and these are apps right so they're on your browser like chrome or brave or you can download them onto your actual system so if you have mac or windows you can actually download download the application onto your system rather than using it as an extension in your chrome browser and then of course you have uh application versions as well on iphone and android these are usually free and very easy to use you just download the app and you set up a new wallet it's completely free these are open source software and these are self-custodial wallets so you own everything here examples are trust wallet.
This is a multi-blockchain wallet you can have finance smart chain tokens bitcoin ethereum tokens metamask as well this is an evm wallet meaning ethereum and ethereum based chains for example avalanche binance smart chain polygon and others this is a chrome extension but also has an app trust what it is an application there are others like coinbase wallet as well what are hardware wallets hardware wallets are called cold wallets for a specific reason which i'll explain later on in the video these are actually usually physical devices so they're not applications themselves but they're a device which holds some very important info which i'll get onto so devices like ledger and trezel are by far the leading brands in the space i wouldn't really consider anything else because these are the leaders and they just do their job very well usually a hardware wallet is known as a cold wallet because it is offline meaning that the special keys are kept in this device and not connected to the internet it's therefore considered safer to use this type of device but there are some downsides because there are a hardware you know usb stick kind of thing so it is more secure the downside is you do have to buy them 30 to 80 and you do have to link them up with a hot wallet.
if you want to actually do something with the blockchain i'll leave links to both of those in the description if you want to check them out the next stage is paper wallets so just think of essentially every single blockchain will give you a private and a public key and that is your wallet you can actually download that and just write it down on paper so that's an old-school way of doing things or you can even buy a metal sheet if you want to kind of store it properly these are from zero dollars if you just want to write the keys down on a bit of paper they often use qr codes as well which you can print out or you can spend a few bucks and actually get like a metal version or something like that the problem is it's extremely difficult to use your coins right this is like putting things in a mattress under you know six feet under and you're never gonna kind of reach it again right so why bother with this well these are kind of considered the safest because they never interact with anything online this is a very simplified version of how you would create a wallet and then start interacting with the blockchain .
so for example we have the bitcoin blockchain here which is doing its thing every 10 minutes just sending coins amongst wallets that actually want to send coins at that time and keeping a record of all of those transactions every single bitcoin wallet is on the bitcoin blockchain not anywhere else now what we're going to do is have sally down here she's going to create a bitcoin wallet and she's going to use either trust wallet or ledger it doesn't matter every wallet allows you to do the same thing which is create another wallet in the chain on the chain when you create a wallet two things are created well three things one of them is the public key as you can see here this is otherwise known as your address the public key creates the public address think of this as your email address right if you have a wallet you need an address that people can send you things to this is your email address this is your address where people can send you coins and so you can give this out to people.
when someone says i want to send you coins you give them your bitcoin address which is linked into your public key you can tell people this people can send you stuff to it but they can't control the wallet if they have it right so it's exactly like an email address people can send to can't actually control the email unless they have the email password which is your private key your private key is basically your password to control the wallet and all of its contents the private key is absolutely vital very important if you or anyone else has this private key it's like them having the password to your email account so this is incredibly important to keep safe and to write down if you lose this and you don't have access to it it's like losing the password to your email address you'll never have your email again and if you've got a million dollars of bitcoin and you lose your private keys you've burnt that million dollars .
the public and private keys are linked by cryptography meaning that they are actually linked up and so whoever has access to the private key can actually have access to the public key that's why you have to keep it really safe now what happens if someone wants to send some bitcoin to you well what they can do is take your public key and send that via a transaction on the blockchain via their wallet bitcoin and wallets are always on the blockchain and people just use wallets to interact with them so here's a cheat sheet about wallet addresses public keys and private keys a crypto address is simply like your email address or your mailbox it's the it's the place where people send coins and it looks something a little bit like this public keys are the key that generates the address but people often you know intermingle them and say them in the same way a public key is literally just your public address where people know this and they can send you coins private keys are the most important thing this is linked to your public key through cryptography but because of cryptography no one can work out your private key through your public key because of cryptography that's the whole point of what crypto is this is the password that enables the creation of the public key it's so important it works in tandem so they are linked do not tell anyone this when you get this because that is essentially giving someone the pin number to your card or a password to your bank account application .
anyone who has that has access to your coins crypto is a bearer instrument if someone has a private key to a wallet they can log into it and spend everything that is where not your keys not your crypto comes from if someone else has your keys or if an exchange has the keys to hot wallet then it's not your crypto because someone else has access to your coins you might notice that wallet addresses are very long complex and that's obviously because of the cryptography and how they interact with other very long numbers that's just the way it is they have to be long and random to be individual these days you can actually get nft names that you put in the wallet that give you a human readable address so you have a wallet and you buy an nft that goes in the wallet and it gives you an address a bit like a web domain you can use services like unstoppable domains i use them there's also ethereum name service and every single other blockchain will have their own service but eth.ethe domains essentially is like a web address so you can have decentralized websites built on this or if someone wants to send you coins they can just type in your name dot eth.eth and then that will be routed through the ethereum network to their wallet address as long as the wallet address holds the nft domain so you can see here ethereumnerd.eth is actually available right here and you do have to pay a fee for this unfortunately it's just like registering a domain name on godaddy you can register it forever though if you have enough eth but when it runs out you do have to spend the eth on that again to get that name other services like which i use which is unstoppable domains they have different domains like crypto.nft.wallet and you can uh you know search for this now they use the polygon blockchain and you can just link that up once you buy that nfc there are no renewal fees and it just goes in your wallet you can search for anything on here now what's good about unstoppable is that they don't actually just use one blockchain you can use multiple chains and link all of them up through one wallet address and that's why i use them i'll link them below if you want to check them out but there are you know a lot of services where you can buy an nft and then hold it forever and have that domain name that people can send you money to not your keys not your crypto you hold no coins in your wallet you just hold the keys and that's why there are different versions of wallets to basically make holding the keys as safe as possible if binance has your wallet keys which they do then that is not your crypto if a ledger device your ledger device has the private key then that is your crypto if trust wallet has your private key and it's yours that's your crypto if a hacker has your private key that is their crypto these two you do not own that crypto okay so even binance if they're holding it for you you don't have the keys you don't have control of that until you send it out to either one of these self-custodial wallets these days very few people interact with the private key they're actually given what's known as a seed phrase when they set up a wallet if you go to metamask and you set up a wallet they will give you 12 to 24 words that are randomly generated and linked to the private key so if you create a metamask account and have these 12 to 24 words and then go to a different computer and you want to load the same wallet all you have to do is just press restore wallet put in these 12 words and it will load up your wallet and show all of your coins sitting there many modern wallets let you manage many different crypto assets over many different blockchains and so that's why they give you this because this actually is like a root key that links up to all the other private keys you can actually write this down or even memorize it so if you can remember 12 words you can just keep that in your head and then do anything you want you'll always have access to those same coins on any different computer the benefit of cold storage or hardware wallets is that there is an air gap between your keys and what happens online so cold storage keeps your keys offline hackers cannot access your private keys if they are kept on these devices this is good for your investments and crypto that you want to keep aside and have no use for you can also use d5 and actually invest your coins in you know d fire and keep them there but still keep your keys on these devices i truly recommend hardware wallets if you've got more than a few thousand dollars they can be a little bit of a pain to access like you're definitely going to need the wallet with you if you want to transact or spend coins because you need to actually go onto the hardware wallet itself look through the transaction and confirm the transaction by pressing some buttons but that's the price you pay for having the safest way to keep your keys offline hot wallets are great if you have under a few thousand dollars because they're completely free to use and they're way better than keeping it somewhere like an exchange where you know you don't know what they're going to do with your coins hot wallets you need these to interact with dfire so what you can do is use metamask with a ledger wallet so what that does is it keeps your keys offline but when you want to interact with dfire you can actually link your ledger wallet up with metamask and that means that all the keys that are on your ledger you're able to transact on the blockchain with them and so that is why hot wallets and software wallets are often linked up hackers can fish your info with hot wallets though if you have a browser wallet and you get phished and you click some links you shouldn't then unfortunately you may actually get all of those coins drained out of your wallet which is why so many people need to use a hardware wallet soft wallets or or hot wallets though are good as burner wallets if you've got some nfts that you're playing around with or you've just got a little bit of cash that you you know you want to interact with some smart contracts they're great for that but yeah you can definitely link these with cold wallets for extra security and you do need hot wallets to be able to interact with defy so then wallets just manage your public and private keys they don't hold any coins whatsoever cold wallets are safer but they do need to be used with hot wallets to transact with d5 all coins wallets are always on the blockchain everything is on the blockchain you're just keeping those keys you can buy human readable .addresses and then ft that's what i do and people can send you coins via a cool domain name.
No comments:
Post a Comment