Bitcoin Forum

Hi There,

Trying to get my head around the coming fork or whatever might happen.

It is all a bit over my head. So i'll leave it to the experts.

Just wondering what is the best wallet to use to protect my investments.

I have both BTC and ETH so I am using Exodus at present as it is nice clean, and holds my coins in one place.

Should I be using a wallet that downloads the entire blockchain instead, to keep my BTC for the coming month or two?

I am sure some of you BTC geeks will know.

Advice appreciated, explanations would be awesome.

cheers,

Rhyso

Simple test to see if your wallet is suitable for holding coins:

1. Does your wallet provide you with the private keys for all addresses contained in it?

Yes? Wallet is OK.
No? Wallet is not Ok.

If you have access to the private keys, you are good to go regardless of what happens. You can put your private key(s) into "LeftForkWallet"™ and have access to "LeftForkCoins"™... and/or you can put your private key(s) into "RightForkWallet"™ and have access to "RightForkCoins"™

What you DO NOT want to do is put your coins in any online service like an exchange/gambling site/web wallet etc where you do not have direct control over the private keys and are at the mercy of that service as to which way they want to send to your coins.

Hi,

Thanks.

Still kinda confused how I will end up with 2 lots of coins when I have one wallet and one set of keys...

But I do have keys and my wallet seems pretty pro and has lots of support. It all just seems a bit vague for us crypto investors that are not tech savvy.

Cheers

Rhyso

Well, that's the worst case scenario with a fork, they never come back together and the two chains effectively become two incompatible cryptocoins.   In this hypothetical scenario, the two coins share a history up to a certain point at which they diverged.  You have private key(s) which are from the shared part of the history.  That means that just as one cryptocurrency has now become two, your coins in the original cryptocurrency have now become coins in LeftForkCoin and in RightForkCoin (I love these names).   As long as you control your own private keys, you are safely a part of the "winning" coin when and if a "winner" becomes apparent.  If there never ends up being a winner and both forks retain their value, you're happy to have both coins.

I hope that helps.


So, this part is good.  :)

Electrum and some hardware wallets have promised versions that will support both chains when the time comes so it is better to stick to one of them if you want to be ready for a potential fork. Electrum is a free wallet and the hardware ones you need to buy them but since you are an investor as you say I don't think 0.05 bitcoin will be a problem as that's the cost for one of them.

Trezor and Ledger have been through this before with previous fork scares, and have always promised firmware updates that would allow one to spend on the fork of your choice. Using a hardware wallet with Electrum might be a very good choice.

Looking it in this way, and I am a newbie around, This makes me think, with some wallets, people will  lose money(bitcoin) ?

Trezor +1, used it to store some ETH and happy with it for now. :D

Basically the only question here is if "do you have access to your private key"? Even in case of a fork your key will work for your btc address

So what if LeftForkCoin and in RightForkCoin really happens after that SegWit2 will be enabled, Should I really make a hardware wallet early as now and get my bitcoin balances from Coinbase? or this Online wallets have a plan also with this event if it will really happen? I am not a geek to know about this sorry.

You have to go by what the wallet providers publish. Trezor is on top of this and is in stock, recommend you buy one before they run out. They seem to be selling fast:) Ledger is already out of stock.

This is not a viable question.  If there is a fork, then the end results are going to be one consensus coin or two accepted versions and it does not matter what wallet you have, you will be on the same fork either way. 

Your blockchain is going to be the same, and if it is accepted as consensus, then you are there, if not, then you are are gone.

You should get your private keys from coinbase.  I don't know if they allow this,  if they don't, you should move your coins to and address you control.  That's my opinion.

You will need to contact Coinbase and find out what their plans are in the event of a fork happening and "LeftFork" and "RightFork" becoming actual separate coins as opposed to one "consensus" coin.

As I stated right at the beginning of this thread, if you leave your coins in an online wallet where you do not control the private keys, then you have no control over what is happening in the event of a fork... your "wallet" or, more correctly, your "account" provider will make a decision about what is going to happen for you.

I foresee the network getting quite busy around the end of July and a lot of "account" balances being transferred from a lot of online services to "proper" wallets.

Just make sure that you have access to the private keys to the addresses you use. And save them in a good safe place (maybe even print them and keep them a secret safe place)

Don't use an online wallet that doesn't grant you that or an online exchange (which is way worse and doesn't guarantee you anything.)

IMHO blockchain.info wallet would solve your problem. It is the online wallet and private key will be with you always. Further, you don't have to be download a full node to do transactions like offline wallet i.e. bitcoin core 0.14.2.

Every wallet which you have your private keys or passphrase. Ledger would be an good option.

it' easy.
just choose one who will give you the possibility to export private Keys.
You need this feature to import Keys in the new wallet who will be able to manage the new chain!

The wallet doesn't matter. I think that's something that is not explained enough. The wallet is just an interface to your "bank account", it isn't your bank account. The bank account is the private key. You can use 10 wallets AT THE SAME TIME with the same key, it doesn't matter (of course if you send several transactions from several wallets, it will be messy).

Conversely, if you don't have the private keys, you don't control your "bank account".

Regardless, I would be wary of online or wallets connected to the internet there are so many cases of fraud especially when there is a fork given the confusion, etc.

If you're going to use a desktop wallet like myself I would recommend using the elctrum desktop wallet. Extremely leightwheigt (no need to download the entire blockchain) and it supports a potential fork. If you're going for a hardware wallet you probably want to consider a trezor hardware wallet.

I would go with either a hardware wallet such as Trezor or Ledger, or even a desktop installed wallet like Exodus.

Any wallet that gives you access to your private keys should suffice.

I really like Armory .... never had any problems with it ...

ps-> sometimes I even think that I can blame the compiler LoL  ;D

There are many wallets,
Trezor is one of the best wallet.
I'm using it, operating system is very easy and also safe.

Exodus is a great wallet. Just make sure you export and back up your private keys just in case.

Here's a tutorial on how to do that - http://support.exodus.io/knowledge_base/topics/how-can-i-view-my-private-keys-1

any wallet that supports private keys export/import is fine
if you ask for a particular recommendation,I would suggest Electrum or Trezor
if you don't have a hardware wallet,go for Electrum-it is great and easy to use
here you can find info on how to sweep/import your private keys to Electrum:
http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#can-i-sweep-private-keys-from-other-bitcoin-clients
http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#can-i-import-private-keys-from-other-bitcoin-clients

here you can read a short article on sweep vs import:
https://99bitcoins.com/know-more-private-key-import-vs-sweep-difference/

But I do have keys and my wallet seems pretty pro and has lots of support. It all just seems a bit vague for us crypto investors that are not tech savvy.

I'm using it, operating system is very easy and also safe.

So ı have my bitcoins on Bitpay which gived me a private key. But it is online as you know and there is an alert on the bitcoin.org website about Bitpay. ( https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2017-10-09-segwit2x-safety )

I am confused. Do i have to send my coins to core wallet or it is ok to store in Bitpay? If i need to send, is there a problem with this transaction? Becouse i have it on Bitpay before 25/10.

I hope someone can help me with it.
Thanks.

From what I read, you can get the private key from the bitpay wallet and therefore you should be able to retrieve the new coins.

But this is up to the wallet service, in this case Bitpay.

They could make it easy or hard.

Electrum has been my main wallet throughout all the previous forks and I've never encountered any problems in the process of using it. Of course if you want to be 100% sure you can also use the standard bitcoin core wallet but you have to take into account that you will have to download the entire blockchain (about 140 gigs at the time of writing this). Either way, whichever wallet you pick make sure you have full access to your coins (= have access to your private keys).

I have the private ket that Bitpay has given to me but the alert message that i mentioned above has confused me. Thank you for your reply.

If you are not going to buy and sell, the best is the paper wallet.

I do know that Electrum is a good wallet but I don't wanna risk my coins on a PC. Since it is more prone to viruses it is not as safe as keeping the coins on your phone wallet. In addition to that, we can open and watch it anytime we want. What do you think about mycelium wallet. Will it do the job since it gives the seed with the backup of 12 words.
I guess this will workout. But I don't know how to claim the B2X. Does any wallet supports the seed from mycelium ?

usb-stick wallet is best choice.

The most reliable purse is Ledger Nano S, this is an offline purse-flash drive, in 24 codes you write down on paper and hide it so that in case you lose or steal a USB flash drive you can order the same and restore all data

https://www.ledgerwallet.com/

I have decided to use Electrum. Its easy to install and you won't need to download the blockchain.

It provides easy options to save your private keys in JSON or CSV format. The files would be safer if you copy them and keep in an offline media.

https://i.imgur.com/Dx3FpTW.jpg

Delete them from your PC once exported and keep in mulitple offline places. 2 cheap USB drives and writing a CD just in case should be enough.

Because the word "wallet" is very misleading. The blockchain holds the data and the "wallet" is a means of creating new blockchain entries and/or checking on existing blockchain entries.

Wallet software must assemble a transaction and send it to the miner pools, then the transaction is included in a block and becomes part of the chain. But the typical idea of "wallet" is something that contains something valuable. If coin could move from wallet to blockchain then wallet could contain coin. But it can't. Coin can only move from one address to another.

For me the best solution in the past was Electrum, I had no problems with the forks

and everything was pretty easy to handle.

How much you guys expect to gain on such a move? Would it be much more than investing in Alts at -50% discount?

I think that any wallet where you have the full control over your private keys is good choice and that is also the most important feature. Electrum could be one of the good choices. The other issue is that with this multiple forks that are happening not all wallets are supporting them or better to say the coins like recent Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin gold so if that is important to you that is another thing you have to pay attention.

The best thing for you would be hardware wallet. It is safe from hacker attacks and it will be safe for the potentional fork. There are many hardware wallets to choose from. I would personally choose nano. If you are ready to spend some of your BTC buy hardware wallet. It will meet up with your expectations. I hope I helped a bit.

I use electrum, that is what most people has recomended regardless. And I like its simplicity and that its easy to add notes on every transaction. And I hope it will work well for the upcoming fork the 16 november :)

I think Coinbase would be nice for an online wallet to withhold your Bitcoins with this incoming Hard Fork because they said that when the Bitcoin network mines the block 494,784(that's the time for Segwit2x) they will give the exact amount of Bitcoin2x(new coin after Hard Fork) to the users who hold their Bitcoins at their platform. As of now I am using an Electrum wallet for my desktop computer and I am all good with it because I also hold my private keys that is eligible in getting the new coin and it doesn't need to download the whole blockchain in able to use it.

Hello. Does it make sense to buy a purse on a physical medium?

Yes. that's the smiple rule. After fork, you still need find the proper wallet to recover your keys to gain your coins.
what if a consolidate wallet which act quickly to support all fork coins?  ::)

U can also use paper wallet. It's very safe.

Here's the question i ask myself  ;)

question

1 . Does it allow you to export private ?

result

Yes : <- Use
No :  <- ( lol )

Enjoy :)

I like coinomi (only on smarthone at this time), team is very reactive and new forked coins are implemented very quickly (bch, btg etc)