Bitcoin Forum

If you're not yet familiar with the situation, Binance only have 90 days to operate in my country (the Philippines) and given that I've stored my hoard of bitcoin there for a long time already, I'm a bit panicky as to where I should store it (ironic that I'm like that when I'm a staunch believer that I don't care if I lose my bitcoins) so my question is, what alternative wallet or exchanges I can store my bitcoins, wallets would be appreciated and some of my irl crypto friends already recommended me two wallets and an exchange and hopefully they're going to be the same as your recommendations so I can finalize my decision.

Binance is an exchange. Why store bitcoin on an exchange. Not your key not your coin.

Store your coins on noncustodial wallet.

Use passport hardware wallet for bitcoin
Electrum for small amount
Trezor hardware for altcoins and bitcoin

The only real alternative for storing your bitcoins is your personal, non-custodial (preferably open source) wallet. Why are you even asking such a question? You should already have enough experience to know that.

Have you ever lost bitcoin due scammy exchange? I am asking because people usually don't care (or to put it better they think they don't care) until it actually happens to them.


An obvious choice is a hardware wallet, preferably open source one like Trezor. And please forget about storing your bitcoin in another CEX as that's just an "accident" waiting to happen.

Kucion and OKX  i saw a thread about this in our local, they are saying that these two including Bybit do have a p2p exchange where you can also trade going to your account/gcash. there are several alternatives for us so binance may not be your option for cashing out since that's what we worry about.

its another KYC to submit though but i think its still worth the trouble especially when you need them if Binance is blocked.

I highly suggest using exchanges for trading and absolutely not as a means of storage.

Assuming it's for general use case, other reputable CEX should work like bybit, kucoin,etc. yes? and In case you're interested who has obtained a license, I found a nice list, see: List of Licensed Virtual Currency Exchanges in the Philippines (https://bitpinas.com/feature/list-licensed-virtual-currency-exchanges-philippines/)

In addition, perhaps you're interested on talking about this with your locals on Pilipinas board (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=219.0)?  :D

Good riddance, indeed! You're now trying to find an alternative wallet, hopefully a much better one, because Binance will be kicked out. That's a blessing in disguise. Thanks to the Philippine government you're now forced to quit a very bad practice.

If you're feeling panicky now that you're finally leaving Binance, you should have felt more panicky before when you're keeping your funds there.

Do you trade all those "hoard of bitcoin" that you're storing in Binance? If not, don't consider another centralized exchange. Surely, you must have already heard of hardware wallets and Electrum and BlueWallet and so on. If you trade but only a small portion of your funds, then keep only your trading funds in an exchange and the rest in a self-custodial wallet.

If they're referring to local exchanges we won't be able to name the same service at all. For example, if you are an Indonesian, the exchange recommendation is going to be different than your usual Kraken, Poloniex, etc recommendation. You should probably ask this on your local board if you want to compare how the members here feel about your friends' recommendations. On the other hand, why won't you just give us names instead? I don't see the point of waiting whether people will recommend you the same service or not if you want to check reviews, to begin with.

You can move your Bitcoins to a private wallet as mentioned by several other members. You can also move your funds to exchanges such as KuCoin, Bybit, MEXC or others.

But it's best to keep your Bitcoins in a private wallet and only send them to an exchange if you want to trade them.

You can buy a hardware wallet to store Bitcoin and other altcoins. It will be safer and more comfortable for you because you won't worry about anything.

Of all that have replied to this thread, you're the only one that did offer alternatives thanks for that and to answer your opinions on how I store my crypto, it's none of your business plus I've said it already that I don't care too much about my bitcoin losing, I've said it on other threads long ago, I don't like to be tied down too much managing my bitcoin stash so I do this stuff but I guess I'll change my ways slowly if that bitcoin becomes helpful to me especially if I plan to have a family in the future. Hardware wallets are a strong consideration to me too but I like the convenience of being stored in exchanges so I can quickly sell off parts of my investments.

Anyone have an opinion or, better still, an experience about Etoro or Swissquote ?
These are traditional brokers who also offer cryptos in addition to classic ETF/stock/CFD style products. Personally I would feel more reassured as they have been around for a while. Particularly in view of what's happened with Binance, the others are likely to follow the same fate.

We can suggest the best noncustodial wallet which is

• Windows system electrum sparrow
• Android samurai wallet
• ISO Blue wallet
• MAC electrum

what is better exchange, it is better to ask your local board, as you have local board that have more information about crypto exchaneg that have license to operate in the Philippines.

Another country where Binance is operating without license and is not getting forced to shutdown, I guess? If that's the case, I am sure Binance might temporarily halt service in your country and will eventually resume after obtaining proper license. But why are you holding your bitcoin in an exchange? You are risking yourself of losing all your funds. I know you said you don't care, but if the amount is large enough, you will start caring when you won't be able to access your funds. Now is the perfect time to move your funds from an exchange to a "self custodial wallet". Now do your research on those kinds of wallet and chose the one that you think is the best.

I thought we agreed to keep bitcoin on personal wallet where you can have access to only with your private keys.
Binance is a custodial third person platforms and it's not recommended in the first place, what I will advice you is to move your coins off the exchange regardless of whether they will operate in your country or not. Keep you funds off the exchange to be safe from any threat to your investment in bitcoin.

I will recommend you withdraw your bitcoin to external wallet like electrum wallet. The wallet is light and safe software wallet or better use a hardware wallet like ledger. But if you want an exchange, I think Okex is a good choice to buy and sell but not recommended for keeping your coins, you can use Kucoin as well but they don't have liquidity as big as Okex but still, not a recommend place to store your bitcoin.

Okex became OKX and now requires mandatory identity verification, same as Kucoin, so they are unlikely to work in the Philippines if Binance doesn't work.
Withdrawing Bitcoin from platforms is necessary, but I can understand if he wanted to leave some low liquidity altcoin or tokens, as it is difficult to find a suitable wallet for them and follow updates, but this brings us back to the main point, which is not to invest in these currencies, or at least for it to be a short-term investment.

Agreed on all of your suggestions for using a private wallet and for the exchange suggestions except MEXC as a Binance alternative. On Kucoin and Bybit, we can speculate that both of them have a chance to be the next biggest exchange in the cryptospace, however, MEXC be careful, I reckon. I do not have any proof that they selectively scam people but I would not trust this exchange over Kucoin and Bybit.

Each to their own i guess. Your keys, your coins, and you can store it anywhere you like. You say you do not care about losing your BTC's, and i am surprised why you say so, because nobody wants to lose money.

The reason why users here would still say say not your keys, not your coins and tell you that you shouldn't store your coins in an exchange, even if you have said you do not care, is because of newbies reading this topic. Like me, i would never recommend an exchange as a wallet for storing coins, only self custodial and open source wallets should be used to store BTC, examples are Electrum, BlueWallet and Sparrow wallet.

To each their own, yes, but people can only say that until they lost everything. Words are cheap. I understand if one is keeping a little amount in an exchange for easy and quick trade whenever necessary, but if you're keeping everything there and you say you don't care, I highly doubt it. Unless it's an amount that's too small that you won't be losing a second of sleep if it's lost, you sure care about losing your precious and hard-earned Bitcoin.

But if the intention is to be able to "quickly sell off parts of my investments", why keep everything on an exchange? Keep that part you intend to quickly sell if the price target is hit and keep the rest in a non-custodial open-source wallet. You don't have to buy a hardware wallet if you don't like it. You actually don't have to spend to safekeep your money.

Send your funds from them to your wallets first. Because it's likely that other exchanges that are not established locally might also be flagged just as Binance. And if you're into storing your crypto, exchanges aren't the way to go because you're not going to do well with them and there can be a much worse situation than them closing down the users from specific areas. As we used to say, they're not providing you with your private keys so that's a no-no if they're going to be used as storage just as you have described it. What's even alarming is that you said that you've been doing this for a long time, don't wait until an unfortunate thing happens to the new exchange where you're planning to deposit and keep it.

no one can guarantee an exchange to last long. except those that are legal and licensed in your country.
I would suggest moving your assets on binance to your own wallet.
can use electrum for bitcoin
for non bitcoin you can use trust wallet.

Trustwallet is owned by Binance as well, moving your funds from Binance to Trustwallet doesn't have any difference in terms of security since it's closed source.

To @OP i used Kucoin for a long time already even use their P2P for crypto to PHP. As well as don't use exchange as wallet alternative, it's better to do like that.

Even those fail sometimes. Celsius was registered in US and we saw how that ended up, so in any case you shoulnd't trust exchanges for storing your crypto and should be mainly used for their primary purpose which is trading.


While Trust wallet is indeed owned by Binance and it is a closed source, I woulnd't say that funds there are equally in danger as they would if kept on Binance. With that being said, Trust wallet is definitely a bad idea for a long term hodl but its not the worst for a multicurrency hot wallet where you hold up to $100-200.

Let's start by not recommending any exchanges, since you need somewhere to transfer your wealth!

I know it might be convenient for you to store your bitcoins on an exchange, but it it really worth the risk of losing access to it all?

Remember that something can happen to any exchange overnight, and you might wake up locked out of your account. That is why you must use a non-custodial wallet.

Thanks for everyone that said that I shouldn't do the exchange storing thing and sorry that this is the only time that I was able to reply, got a lot of shit going on and books to catch up but just so you know, I don't have a lot of bitcoins that I fear losing it in an exchange and no I haven't been scammed by an exchange, Binance has been a pretty good exchange to me, the convenience that it gives to me whenever I want to sell my bitcoin is why I'm storing my bitcoins there, I don't know if you all know my philosophy but I've posted about it a long time ago so I can't find it or I'm just lazy (that's for you to decide) but I don't really care too much about money or material things, I always try not to put myself in position where I'm stressed out on things that involves things. But for the sake of others that might take this post the wrong way, don't do what I do when it comes to storing your bitcoin, listen to the pros.

So you're listening or choose to be as it because it gives convenience? Because I can't able to understand that you learnt storing Bitcoin in an exchange is risky but you're not concerned about losing it.

If you only have bitcoin and just install electrum wallet and store your bitcoins in it, the non custodial wallet actually gives the complete control of your funds and you can sell whenever you want just sending the funds back to exchange only paying the fee required at the time.

Correct, I'm not concerned it's not a big deal amount so I do it anyway, the convenience is a bonus. I do plan to install an Electrum wallet but I don't have my own computer yet and I want to learn how to navigate in Linux so I can be much safer so that's the deal for now but rest assured, that's what I plan to do someday with my bitcoins.

Maybe you are too comfortable with cex because it makes it easier for your daily transactions, especially binance with a very good rating, but cex can be affected by issues and problems until the owner of binance itself stumbles over the case too. It's worth it like your real money, of course you don't keep it all in the bank right? maybe some are stored somewhere with your own control. Likewise, bitcoin allows you to store in bitcoincore (https://bitcoincore.org/en/download/) or  electrum  (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=98.0)? I'm also still learning there, it's never too late while maybe you are interested in similar cex like bybit and okx? or kucoin or coinbase? etc. I prefer to interact between the above 3 markets including binance.

I don't know if binance is centralized in one country that has public services maybe in your country, because even though I am in a different country I still do my activities on binance for trading. You can also look at safepal and trust wallet as alternative solutions if you strongly believe in binance products. Know your risk DYOR.

For electrum on android you can instal on =>https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5412471.0 .

Don't take it as a disrespect when others advice you to not store your cryptos in centralized exchanges. They give you this basic advice because when you don't have access to your coins, you don't actually own them. But since you intentionally want to store your coins on centralized exchanges, then you can use Coinbase, Kraken, OKX and the ones listed above. I think these exchanges are available in your country but you should check it yourself again.

Hardware wallets are the best option but you have to carefully choose that. At the moment, Coldcard and Passport are one of the best wallets. Keep in mind that you should never buy Ledger and probably other closed-source wallets.

I'm not taking it as a disrespect, maybe it's the frustration for me but I do welcome those but there's a sense of urgency for my inquiry so I want to disregard that as much as possible and get to the right one, I'm sorry if that came out disrespectful. I mean you did recommend me the exchange which is what I'm looking for but some of the replies just want to tell me not to do this and do that. I do know about closed-source wallets, definitely staying away from them because some of my friends have told me about it and they're really good at breaking programs.

You can install electrum wallet in your smartphone itself if it's Android, for IOS I will recommend blue wallet.

So you're using bitcoin only for trading purpose and not to send anyone personal?

Because withdrawal fee on exchange is hell of an amount to be paid for small amount.

I am having a hard time understanding you here, but binance is a centralized exchange 'everywhere'. Safepal and trust wallet are not exchanges and they are not alternatives to binance, safepal is a hardware wallet and trust wallet is a software wallet, but the both of them are not recommended. For alternatives to binance, try p2p exchanges: https://kycnot.me/?type=exchange

I have seen people telling that they should support local exchanges in our country like PDAX, Gcrypto, Coins.ph and Maya. But as we know, not all of them supports every cryptocurrencies that are found there. A lot of them can be found in many exchanges and as for that exchange, I've been hearing a lot with kucoin, okex and bybit. But this is still depending if the decision of our SEC will also ban and stop their operations here until they comply to any regulating laws applied on them.

I wouldn't even trust them with my bitcoin, I don't think that it's going to be a really good idea to place my bitcoins on a local exchange that will make me easily marked as a crypto enthusiast so the government can watch me behind my back, I've see GCash (Gcrypto) got their customer's funds stolen by hackers so it's not a good idea to go to that exchange even I don't care too much about my bitcoins, I'd just burn it if I would have no choice but to put it there. For temporary storage that don't aren't CEX (rejoice to the people that are right all along, you've converted me), I'll be putting my bitcoins in either TrustWallet or BlueWallet and if there's anyone here that can provide me some other wallet because I'm scared of the 1 star reviews of those two wallets.

1 star reviews from where? I remember reading low rated reviews back then on mycelium from people complaining about stuff they're at fault for lol. Wouldn't be weird if we have the same situation here.

Anyhow. Blue wallet is recommended! it's open source, feature packed and actively maintained. Trust wallet however is closed sourced which is a deal breaker for many of us. Then again, the open source alternative I could think of for multi-coin wallet is only Unstoppable Wallet which apparently appears to be prone on syncing issues -- in my case, it only happened once. Lemme link the discussion thread, see: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5436273.0

Even for temporary storage I woulnd't consider Trust Wallet as its a closed source owne by Binance and its only a decent solution if you need a hot wallet where you plan to store no more than few hundreds of dollars worth of crypto.

As of another alternative for (temporary) bitcoin storage, why not Electrum?

1 star reviews from users Playstore but it's overall around 4.6 stars, Blue Wallet has been recommended to me by a trusted friend so I might consider that too, that's probably the only two wallets that I've been mostly recommended by my friends because they're easy to use and they didn't have any problems using it. I might check out your recommendation too, is it available on Playstore?
I don't know how to set it up on my Android phone, can you link me a thread that will teach me how to do it, I want to use Electrum ever since but the problem is that I don't have a personal computer and I don't like installing one in Windows.

Electrum is of course available on Playstore too, but I would recommend to go through Electrum website as Playstore is notorious for having fake crypto apps there.


I don't understand what's the problem, you install it as any other android app. Just go to Electrum website and under "Download" tab you will find android link.


So you are basically holding everything you have on mobile wallet? If yes, that's a very risky thing to do.

It is available on Playstore, but do not download your wallets from Playstore, it is recommended you download Electrum from the original website, and this is the link to it: https://electrum.org/
You simply download Electrum from the original website and install it. If you only have a mobile device, then you have to buy a hardware wallet, so you store your funds offline and in a safe environment.

Can you redirect me to the original website of Electrum, I don't want to end up downloading a fake and end up losing that bitcoin for nothing. I'm not really sure about the first website that pops up when I search "Electrum wallet" on Google.

I've read what people advised you about and I urge you to follow them promptly. But what still baffles me is that you had spent over 4 years in this forum, how careless could it still be to be "storing" your coin in an exchange? I quoted the "storing" because by using that word by you mean that were not using it to trade but saving it there for investment purposes. That is careless in this dispensation.

Exchanges can't be trusted particularly if your money is big. The best bet is to store your money in non-custodial wallets, and by doing that, you have the true right to your assets. This is unlike with exchanges that have the true right to it but merely owe you.

Binance is fine for holding small funds. specially when you are not planning to hold them or long term. which is true in OPs case. for regular spenders like us binance is more convenient than any external wallet. where can easily withdraw them using P2p, or trade them if needed. or participate in Binance launchpool campaigns to earn some extra tokens.

You suggestions are good if the person planning to hold his funds for long term or he has a lot of funds. I never keep more than $10k in Binance.