Hardware wallet
One of the most important aspect of your cryptocurrencies holdings, is how to protect your coins and be safe. As you know there are a lot of softwares for wallet, paper wallets, brain wallets, hardware wallets and so on. There are a lot of ways you can store your digital funds but many of them are difficult for a basic user.
The easier way to keep safe your funds is to have an hardware wallet. An hardware wallet is a physical device normally with a usb port which is created to hold your private keys securely and in a cold way. In this article we can discuss about ledger nano S. The most important things to keep in mind to be really secure are:
Security tips in purchase
- never purchase the ledger nano s from ebay or from a private person. always purchase from an authentic dealer. Otherwise you risk to get an altered device where the seller has the keys;
- never use an hardware wallet which is not sealed;
- never use an hardware wallet which has already been initialized;
- dont trust seller who sell the wallet to a too cheap amount;
the previous points are to be secure in purchase phase. When you get your new and sealed ledger nano, the first thing to do is to initialize it (do not use it if already initialized by someone else). Once you get the seed, it must be kept written on paper in a safe place. The seed is the only way to recover your funds in case you lose or break the device. So be very careful. The seed can be used also to restore the wallet with a BIP39 compatible software.
When this procedure is completed and you are sure you correctly written on paper the seed and triple checked it, you can start configuring the device. The configuration means that you use the internal device settings facility to decide which coins initially install. You can install just few of the total amount of supported coins. But you can uninstall and reinstall tokens in your wallet without losing funds, because what is important is the seed.
So if you install, for example, LTC and put funds, then you can uninstall LTC and install a different coin. The LTC will be always kept ok even if the facility is removed. When you again want to move the LTC, it’s ok to reinstall the LTC facility. You will immediately access to the LTC funds you had before.
Security tips usage
Final points to keep in mind are:
- never keep the device always connected to a computer;
- set up a good PIN for your wallet and do not store it online;
- always check the recipient address on the wallet display when you use the wallet to send the money out. Infact you must check that your destination address as you wrote it in the facility for the transaction is correctly displayed on the wallet itself. They must be the same. Some attacks infact work changing such address while sending;
- if you use the web connection for the wallet, always check which page are you connected on. For example if you use with myetherwallet, carefully check that you are actually on myetherwallet page and not some other similar address. This is very important or you risk losing funds;
If you have done all the above, you are one step ahead in the direction of a safe digital funds keeping. In this world, you are the only responsible of your funds, you must be careful and very wise.
