OldFag: Wallet is safer than an exchange?

Can someone explain to me why you young kids insist an online wallet is a safe place to keep your crypto?

As an old fuck (over 40), one of my main fears of this stuff was one day I'd long onto Bitstamp or Binance to find they'd 404'ed. USD and any coins I have them, gone. Poof

Then you guys chastised me for keeping my coins/cash on the exchanges and said Im supposed to send them to wallets immediately unless Im actively trading. How is a wallet any safer?

Ive been using MEW and Electrum. Couldn't the same thing happen? If MEW 404s and the Electrum app one day says "Cant connect to server" after I enter my password in the App, how would I be able to send those coins to another wallet?

Thx for helping an old fuck again /biz!

MEW isn’t a wallet, its a ways to interract with th blockchain. if the MEW website goes down your public and private keys can still be used to interract with the blockchain

So if the MEW website 404s, how would I hope a new wallet and get the coins from the now-dead MEW into it? Seems like when I open a new wallet (I opened Electrum after MEW to hold my BTC bag) the new wallet wouldn't have any way to allow me to send coins to it w/o being able to access the old wallets interface

(how would I open)

mew is just an interface, you would use geth or mist or metamask or etc...

you just plug in your private keys to any compatible format and then you get access to your coins on the blockchain

Ok, thanks for clarifying this. Thing only thing I'd "have" physical possession of if MEW 404's is my private key. The only thing I'd have physical possession of if Electrum goes down are the seed words.

These are enough to copy/paste into another wallet to access the coins?

Thanks. Electrum doesn't have a key, I just have seed words. Is this the same thing? or should I move my BTC bag out of Electrum into another wallet (I guess MEW doesn't accept BTC?)

what about etherdelta? is it safe to keep coins int there

just die you boomer faggot, you've done enough damage

>one of my main fears of this stuff was one day I'd long onto Bitstamp or Binance to find they'd 404'ed. USD and any coins I have them, gone. Poof
already happened with Bittrex

yes but i would maintain hard copies of both private keys and seeds (to extent possible)

>Implying a 40 year old is a boomer

Im Gen X, but yes we still believe our 401K is our main source of retirement income. Thank you for your kind words.

Crap!!!! I was keeping my USD and coins on the 3 x exchanges I was using, Cuckbase, Binance, and Bitstamp thinking "these aren't exactly TD Ameritrade, Vanguard, Schwab....." Didn't know it already happened to one of them!

You guys were the ones who quickly schooled me to get the coins into Wallets but I was always wondering how a website wallet was any safer. Starting to understand now thanks to you guys!

if mew gets hacked they can snoop on your privates though, no?

the site is homebrew and susceptible to scripting attacks. much riskier than a centralized exchange in that sense

Thx. Yup Ive definitely kept printed copies of everything (again Im over 40 and paper is our preferred method of record keeping anyway!)

But I wasn't sure until now (thx guys) that just typing in a bunch of seed words into a new BTC wallet would be enough to recover my BTC if one day the Electrum app doesn't connect.

private keys, how do they work?

You laugh, but most of us old fucks dont understand any of this.

I bought 1.0 BTC a while ago and just left it sitting on Coinbase for months. And you guys yelled at me 'NO NO move it to a wallet!!!' So ok, WTF is a wallet. Hell, I didn't even know they existed, Cuckbase lets you fund with freaking Visa like us old fucks are used to.

Now from memory, when opening Electrum and MEW, it was the wallet that gave me the address and key (or in Electrum's case, seed words). So I dont fully understand how if I open a new wallet, I can paste in the key/seed from the old one and presto my coins are in the new one. Can I open a second wallet right now and do that?

What is an old guy like you doing on Veeky Forums?

/pol was on CNN

it's called importing a wallet / key
you can't import just a private key for most btc wallets because it's not a security best practice

Thx. You're implying ETH wallets are easy to import from?

If Electrum App (for macs) or .exe for PCs stops working one day, whats another go-to BTC wallet that I can use to recover my coins?

Should I pull out of Electrum now into a better (any recommendations) BTC wallet?

i don't fuck with software wallets for btc, shit is way too valuable. nano all the way

and to answer your other question, yes, mew is a godsend

Thx.

You have a recommendation for a non-software wallet I should use for my BTC ?

Most of the kids here wonder how we found Veeky Forums. The majority of them fall in the category of, dad should have asked for a bj instead of falling for the cum in me trap.....

Keep some in a wallet, keep the rest spread out through 10 different exchanges. You might need it on one site over another for arbitrage reasons.

Oh, and learn ether delta. It's not as hard as these tards make it out to be.

My thoughts are free, tips are accepted
13P3rLC35ctQqJafT7sYsHBeR6E9Wr5fMX

Nano ledger s
Damn ez to use.

i keep my bitcoins on exchanges all the time, mainly because im not interested in paying a 4$ transfer fee that takes half a day to hit the exchange anyway

I got here when some user yelled PEPAAAAYYYY!!! at Hillary Clinton on live TV and google led me to /pol

Whay do you mean

Man, I hear that! I posted here about a week ago a problem I was having with Electrum. I had sent 1.3 BTC from Electrum to Bitstamp. It was suck for 48 HOURS. Yes, 48 hours it took to clear. I was freaking out, thinking "Ok this is it, this is how it turns out to be all a scam", that my BTC had totally disappeared. It eventually showed up in Bitstamp but that was a wakeup call that this stuff (BTC anyway, seemed the times I sent ETH was a lot faster?) can be really fucking slow !

I don't know i keep my coins on exchanges because my biggest fear is i spill beer over my hard drive. Which has happened before.

I spread them over a couple exchanges though, so if one goes down, i didn't lose everything.

Probably not the best choice, but it's working for now

58 E for a USB type wallet? I was hoping the user who said he doest fuck with software wallets (Im using Electrum) for his BTC would let me know what he uses instead. Unless this is what he meant by not using a software wallet? You guys use "hardware" wallets?

go visit /pol

i said nano as well, finish reading my reply

>but $60 to protect muh $10k investment

Ya I see now. I thought when you said 'nano all the way' you meant that was another kind of non-software (like Electrum) wallet similar to MEW.

Now I got ya. Hardware one. Ya i might order one of those now.

good. it's super easy to use, secure, & well worth it if you're hodling 1 btc. easy to ask for as holiday gift as well even from non-crypto-inclined senpai

Thx bud! Ordered it. Im a US expat working overseas so express shipping was kinda expensive. Came to 131 USD total for 3-5 day shipping. But I guess like you said, probably worth it.

Im gonna just be a 2.0 BTC unless it ever comes back down to the 3000 range, then I'll be a 5.0 BTC dude. But at 7K plus, I dont see myself buying almost 4 more of them.

Thx for the info /biz

you may be able to find it for half that price from a verified third party reseller (listed on ledger's website) then searching amazon. might depend on where you are in the world.

good luck out there

My problem is I'm diversified as fuck. BTC, LTC, ETH, BAT, OMG, IOC, ARK, ZEN, NEO, FCT, XMR. That's a lot of separate wallets/private keys/seed words to keep track of. And yes, non-trivial amounts in each.

I know I'm playing with Fire but I feel like trying to manage that many keys and passphrases and maybe a few hardware wallets is playing with Fire, too.

Something like this I'd rather buy direct from the Ledger shop. Out here (SE Asia), Ive seen a lot of spyware (i.e. key loggers) that old guys use to spy on their young girlfriends.

"Hey honey, heres a new laptop!" (complete with a key logger that will read every one of your emails and Yahoo chats and Skype chats....)

Im not suggesting that a 3rd party Nano S could come with that, but hey who knows !

Good luck to you too bro!

/oldfag out

Does Electrum give you a normal private key or just their own seed word system?

Relatedly, is there a centralized list of which hardware wallets support which coins, other than checking each individual website, and including upcoming additions?

You're right man, it is.

Im no where near as diversified as you are. I'm BTC, LINK, BMC, ETH. And, like you said, non trivial amounts in all of them (yes you can laugh all you want at me for LINK and BMC but hey!)

MEW seems decent in that its really flexible in how many different tokens it takes. I have my ETH/BMC/and LINK on there. You might check into it (well, as the old idiot who started this thread Im not qual'ed to give advice) and see if it takes your odd stuff too. But it won't take BTC

As far as I remember, Electrum only gave me a 12 word seed phrase. This is all I have hard and soft hidden copies of. So Im guessing there was never a private key from Electrum.

MEW isn't actually your wallet, it's just a website for you to easily access your wallet file. You keep your wallet file (.json) on your own computer/device as well as having a private key you should keep written on paper and hidden somewhere safe.

If MEW were to ever permanently 404 you could still access your wallet through another interface.

If you're dealing with any substantial amount of money though (so much that you'd prefer not to lose it) I would strongly suggest buying a "Hardware Wallet" which is basically a usb device that requires you to physically confirm your transactions by pressing buttons on the device - it's hack-proof, even if you had a trojan/rootkit installed on your computer a hacker still couldn't get to your coins stored on the hardware wallet. Personally I bought one as soon as I had about ~$5k in crypto, but probably should have done so sooner.

Pic related is a Ledger Nano S hardware wallet, arguably the best one to use.

Im learning more about this Crypto thing thanks to you young guys on /biz, thanks.

I just ordered the Nano S today. As far as that wallet file, I dont even ever really SEEING one of those while setting up MEW and Electrum. All the hard copy info I have for MEW is a private key, and all I have for Electrum is are the 12 seed words. I dont even know if I can go back and find the .json (for either wallet) that youre talking about now that they have both been set up a while?

(shit typing today, sorry. Meant to say I dont ever remember seeing any thing an actual file like this .json thing when setting up either wallet. )

Your PK and word combo code do the same thing.

>/pol
>twice
Fucking newfag

Ok, thx!

Hey man, this place was doomed the moment /pol and Pepé made national news !

Fuck off boomer go buy some stocks and bonds faggot

You wanna hear something funny, I actually bought BitCoin stock (I use TD) a while back: GBTC

Dropped like a stone right after I bought it (of course!) but its back up to $927 a share.

A pretty big profit for me if it holds the next 5 hours. At market open, I'm out!

(PS thanks for your kindness)

Suck a dick faggot.

Edgy!

Nope, MEW don't work that way. MEW doesn't store anything, just reads addresses on the block chain, you provide the keys. Once you provide keys, you can ask to send assets to other addresses.

follow through advice

...

Solid advice, thx.

you can always use MEW btw, just download it, its working offline of course

You can export private keys from electrum

I remember you from before. Hi!

Listen old fuck:

FOR BTC:

- Open electrum
- Klick on "File->Save Copy" and put this file on an USB drive (better multiple ones)
- Klick on Wallet->Private Keys->Export and save that file
- Open that file with Texteditor on windows and print it


FOR ETH:
- Save your keystore file from myetherwallet on an USB drive
- open it on myetherwallet
- copy paste Your Address and Private Key

Full paranoia mode:
Go to a new PC and try to recover. Then delete all files from all pc's.

I forgot something for eth:

- copy paste Your Address and Private Key in a texteditor and print it