[General] Bitcoin Wallets - Which, what, why?

[Aljawaab]

for someone with little amount of Bitcoin, is a hardware wallet worth the cost or a well backed-upsoftware wallet on a clean device enough?
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[OmegaStarScream]

for someone with little amount of Bitcoin, is a hardware wallet worth the cost or a well backed-upsoftware wallet on a clean device enough?

It depends what you mean by "little amount" here but If it's something in three-digits range (in terms of dollars), a desktop or mobile wallet should be more than fine. Just make sure you're using something that is open source. Electrum, sparrow, bluewallet are all good options.

[Cricktor]

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Maybe you should try to learn more about the security model and differences of a software wallet compared to a hardware wallet.

A software wallet that holds private keys on an online computer which is exposed to the internet can't really protect the private keys when the computer gets infected by malware that gains sufficiently high access rights to fully compromise the device.

On the other hand a good hardware wallet never exposes and allows access to private keys from a computer which "talks" to the hardware wallet. The private keys remain safe even when the computer is infected with malware as long as good usage practices are applied by the user (meaning the user verifies every detail of a to be signed transaction on the independent display of the hardware wallet before he approves to sign and broadcast the transaction).

TL;DR
A hot software wallet can't protect the private keys when operated on a compromised computer. A compromised computer can't get to the private keys on a good hardware wallet because this isn't possible at all (there should be no firmware code pathways to ever achieve this on a well designed and implemented hardware wallet (I'm not speaking of Ledger crap here)).

[Aljawaab]

The private keys remain safe even when the computer is infected with malware as long as good usage practices are applied by the user (meaning the user verifies every detail of a to be signed transaction on the independent display of the hardware wallet before he approves to sign and broadcast the transaction).

Thanks, I need a little more light on this. When you say "verifies every detail " What exactly should a beginner check on the screen: the address, amount, fee, and change output? Does every device show all of these?

[Cricktor]

...

Learn to quote properly or you could be accused of plagiarism when it looks like you just copy/pasted what I wrote.

It's not rocket science as there's a button for it above every individual post from which you may want to quote something. Full quotes are usually not necessary and in the majority of cases a sign of ignorance and/or laziness.

[nullius]

I ask the community’s help to prepare to request updates to OP for BIP 352 Silent Payments support in wallets.  The kitty-cat was big on privacy, so OP definitely deserves that!  Moreover, I’m currently drafting OP for a new educational campaign against Bitcoin address reuse.  It would be helpful if I could refer newbies to the pinned newbie wallet topic for Silent Payments.

Fun history:  The third merit I ever received was from ChipMixer’s CM for one of my Jr. Member posts against Bitcoin address reuse.

I’m not yet an expert on Silent Payments.  More of an SP n00b.  I just skimmed through BIP-352 v1.1.2 (2026-10-25), with special attention to Appendix A: Light Client Support, then turned to the wiki.

As to wallets, following is a quote from the Bitcoin Wiki’s Silent Payments article; the article was recently added by, and all edits thus far have been made by NotATether (wiki).

Implementations

Sending to a Silent Payments address and receiving to one are separate features. Receiving requires a scanner.

As of August 2026:

• Bitcoin Core does not include Silent Payments in a released wallet. A silentpayments module is present in libsecp256k1. Wallet work is tracked in bitcoin/bitcoin#28536.
• Cake Wallet can send and receive (v4.18.0, May 2024). Scanning is performed on the device.
• Sparrow can send (v2.3.0, October 2025) and receive (v2.5.0, May 2026). Receiving typically uses a Silent Payments-capable Electrum server such as Frigate.
• Electrum does not have in-tree support. Pull request #9900 was declined in favor of an external plugin. A send-only plugin exists.

Hardware signing support depends on the device. Related PSBT fields are specified in BIP 375.

(Note:  Frigate is a Sparrow project.)  Does anyone have more info?


In the hope of getting it into OP, I also ask the community’s wallet experts to suggest info on BIP 157/BIP 158 compact block filters support—both generally, and particularly as to the BIP 158 strategies for SP support suggested in BIP 352 Appendix A.

I myself am seeking C libraries (or maybe Rust?) for BIP-157/158 and other wallet functionality; for what it does, I know very well about the excellent libwally (but no SP yet? whoops).  Meanwhile, I’m using an ancient, outdated Bitcoin Core offline for createrawtransaction and signrawtransactionwithkey, the Esplora API, curl, and a pile of kludgey shell scripts to receive and send BTC with no wallet.  But I’m not so sure that’s on-topic for a newbie wallet thread. 

* nullius has nullwallet, perhaps the subject of future new thread(s).