You may have wondered: how do I store my bitcoin or litecoin? What is the best wallet for bitcoins, IOTAs, or dogecoins? Maybe you've read about online wallets occasionally getting hacked and all coins stolen. A risk no one wants to take. Whether you have collected your cryptocurrencies via a faucet, mining, or trading,losing your bitcoins, litecoins, or other cryptocurrency is something that you will want to prevent. But with all those warnings and risk how can you store your bitcoin, litecoin, and mineral safely and what is the best wallet to keep your cryptocurrencies?

Let's look at the different type of wallets, their advantages and disadvantages, and how to open and where to get them.There are wallets that allow you to store your cryptocurrency online, on your personal computer, on external devices, and even on paper. As you cannot withdraw them, as you would do with dollars, euros, pounds, or yen, finding the most convenient and safest way to store cryptocurrency is an important matter and, in fact, a rather easy task once you get your head around the different options.

Let us commence our journey through the world of cryptocurrency wallets with the most widely known ones: 

Online cryptocurrency wallets

Online wallets for storing bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are aplenty. Numerous sites will provide you with the option of storing you coins, from exchanges to faucets and sites run by enthusiasts keen to offer a simple way of storing your bitcoin or altcoin.

Advantages of online cryptocurrency wallets:

They are easy to be opened and require no technical knowledge. You simply open your online wallet on whatever site your exchange is hosted, your faucet payments are paid, or you deem best for your purposes.

Many of the online wallets such as coinpot will also offer the possibility to exchange the coins stored on your online wallet. On coinpot, for instance, you have the option to exchange the following pairs: 

bitcoin versus litecoin

bitcoin versus dogecoin

bitcoin versus bitcoin cash

bitcoin versus dash

litecoin versus dogecoin

litecoin versus bitcoin cash

litecoin versus dash

dogecoin versus bitcoin cash

dogecoin versus dash

bitcoin cash versus dash

coinpot token versus any of the above cryptos

 

The exchange rate may not necessarily be the best and if you wanted to trade on a larger scale, an exchange is certainly advisable. If you're looking for a quick way of exchanging small amounts, however, sites like coinpot ease the process without any necessary tech knowledge.

Disadvantage of online cryptocurrency wallets:

You have absolutely no control over your wallet. Frequently you won't even know who's behind the online wallet; as in who is hosting the site. 

Online wallets have also been hacked in the past, though the majority have been exchanges. It is likely that security will be improved with time, but the risk of a hack remains nonetheless.

Included in these are any type of mobile wallet essentially they are online wallets even if they may show as an app on your iPhone or Android. 

Desktop cryptocurrency wallets

The second option to store your bitcoin, dogecoin, and their peers are desktop wallets. They are not as easy to operate as online wallets but are still easily manageable for most computer users. Different from online wallets you are required to install software in your computer. For that reason it is crucial to download your desktop wallet only from a trusted source. The best way to find a trusted sources is by going directly to the developer's site and to download their recommended desktop wallet. Some of the currently best desktop wallets for the respective coins are Electrum for bitcoin, Electrum for litecoin, Multidoge for dogecoin, or Monero Lithium Luna. Unfortunately there are no desktop wallets that will allow you to store a variety of coins, thus you will have to dig into whatever currency you are interested in to see what the best wallet is. The choice of which one is the best desktop wallet for you can only be made by you. Each and every wallet has slightly different features and what works for others might not work for you.

Desktop wallets come in two forms:

Light cryptocurrency wallets

Light wallets are the downsized version of full desktop wallets. This is not to say that light wallets are not as good as full cryptocurrency desktop wallets, they simply differ in terms of how they synchronize with the blockchain. Instead of downloading the entire blockchain, thus the entire history of your coins, light wallets only sync the last block. This has a major advantage:

Advantages of light desktop cryptocurrency wallets:

Only the last block is synced. After you first install your wallet, your desktop wallet will sync with the blockchain. This is a very traffic and storage intensive process. The advantage over full desktop wallets is that light wallets will sync much quicker as they only download a fiction of the data that is downloaded onto your computer when using a full wallet.the syncing process may still take a couple of hours before your wallet is up to date on the latest block in the blockchain. Count a couple of hours to a day until your light wallet is fully synced.

Another advantage is subsequently that you need much less space to store your wallet (in principle only the latest block is stored instead of the entire blockchain).

One of the most important advantages for the majority of owners of bitcoin, litecoin and friends is that you are in full control of your wallet. You don't rely on an exchange or hosted of your wallet. You are your own bank. In principle you are what bitcoin and the initial idea behind blockchain is all about: be independent of any institution and in full control.

Disadvantages of light desktop cryptocurrency wallets:

Truth is that there aren't that many, except for one, and that is a crucial factor: if you lose your computer, it crashes and locks you out without any chance of accessing your data stored on your hard drive, you are very much left out of pocket. Different from online banking where an institution can provide you with your password in case you forget, you are your own bank and thus have no one to fall back on when things turn sour. But as with most problems, there's a solution to the problem: just copy your login details to another computer, make a backup on a USB stick, or simply write them down on good old paper.

One other disadvantage is that if you want to trade on an exchange, you will have to transfer your cryptocurrencies from you wallet to an exchange first before being able to trade your bitcoin, litecoin, or any other cryptocurrency. This will eat into your profit, as particularly bitcoin transactions were temporarily tremendously costly. Long gone were the days that a transaction only cost a few cent. Bitcoin transactions had hit transaction costs of 10-30 dollars. So beware.

Some desktop wallets have an in-built exchange that will avoid that drawback. Alternatively you could use other platforms aside from exchanges or trade directly with another person avoiding exchanges altogether.

Full cryptocurrency desktop wallets

Full desktop wallets for bitcoin and friends are similar to light desktop wallets. You will first need to download them from a trusted source before you can use them. Different from light wallets, however, they require a lot more hard drive space, as the program is syncing with the entire blockchain.

Advantages of full cryptocurrency desktop wallets:

The advantages are the same as the ones for the light version.

Disadvantages of full cryptocurrency desktop wallets:

The disadvantages are the same plus the size issue stemming from syncing with the blockchain.

Hardware wallets to hold your cryptocurrencies

Another way of storing your bitcoin, litecoin, ethereum, dogecoin and altcoins is to buy a hardware wallet such as a ledger. In principle a security encrypted USB stick. 

The two most widely used Ledger Nano S and Trezor. Both can store multiple cryptocurrencies from bitcoin to Zcash.

The company Ledger has in fact two different products, the Ledger Nano S and Ledger Nano Blue. As of time of writing, Ledger offers support for about 30 coins, whilst Trezor supports more than 500 coins. The most well known cryptocurrencies, however, are supported by both systems. According to the overviews on the Ledger and Trezor websites, as of June 23, 2018, below a list of some of the coins and which device supports which currency (x indicating the currency is supported).

Currency	Ledger Nano S	Ledger Blue	Trezor One	Trezor Model T
Bitcoin (BTC)	x	x	x	x
Bitcoin Cash (BCH)	x	x	x	x
Bitcoin Gold (BTG)	x	x	x	x
Ethereum (ETH)	x	x	x	x
Ethereum Classic (ETC)	x	x	x	x
Litecoin (LTC)	x	x	x	x
Dogecoin (DOGE)	x	x
Zcash (ZEC)	x	x	x	x
XRP (Ripple)	x	x
Dash (DASH)	x	x	x	x

Advantages of hardware cryptocurrency wallets:

Instead of storing your cryptocurrencies online on someone else's server or on your computer, hardware wallets store your bitcoins and co on the actual hardware. Just as you keep your files on a USB stick, your cryptocurrencies are stored directly on the hardware. In fact, this is not entirely true, your seed is stored on your wallet. You are thus free to also carry them on you and are able to plug, just like a USB stick, the hardware wallet into any computer, not just your own. This gives you freedom and security, as it will be much harder to steal your crypto coins from afar. It would actually take someone to take them off you and even then the culprit would require your login details such as your password.

Hardware wallet also allow you to send and receive funds without any intermediary, such as an additional program. In fact, just as with any other wallet, hardware wallets give you the liberty to do with your coins as you please.

Disadvantages of hardware cryptocurrency wallets:

Don't lose it. It's as simple as that. Another problem might be that the technology will fail leaving you locked out of your ledger wallet. For instance, your hardware wallet is corrupted for whatever reason leaving you unable to access your hardware wallet. We are all too familiar with a USB stick that suddenly stops working. But no worries: you just buy another hardware wallet or sync it with any other type of wallet, such as Electrum desktop wallet, and you'll see your funds again.

Paper wallets for your cryptocurrencies

This is rather ironic, a cutting-edge technology, such as cryptocurrencies, can also be stored on paper, just like any old bank note. There are two types of paper wallets:

1) Simply write down or print out your public and private keys on a good old piece of paper

2) Use one of the free web services that allow you to create your own QR codes that you can then print out. The two QR codes that will be generated for you are your public and private keys, where the public key serves as your address for you to receive funds is generated. The private key is, in simple terms, your key to access your wallet holding your bitcoin, monero, or litecoin.

Advantages of paper cryptocurrency wallets:

Paper wallets are offline and as such cannot be hacked. Different from, for instance, online wallets, no one else has any of your information – it is all stored on a piece of paper. For it to stay entirely safe, it is important that you keep it in a safe place and best have a number of copies in case one gets lost.

Disadvantages of paper cryptocurrency wallets:

This is where the disadvantage of paper wallets lies: as they are pieces of paper, you might easily lose them or forget where you put your paper wallet locking you out of your funds. In addition, if someone else stumbles across your paper wallet, they would have access to your funds.

 

There you have it, the cryptocurrency wallets currently available. Which one you choose is really a personal preference and depends on what you are planning to do with your funds. If you want to trade them, it is probably better to keep them in an online wallet or an exchange, if you want to simply store them, any of the other wallets are probably better options.