How to store bitcoins in your phone (Not using Coinbase or anything similar)

[Passionate]

I've been researching but somewhat failing to know how to find a way to actually store my small amounts of bitcoins in my phone (without actually using any exchange) like in the old days, people store their bitcoins in their hard drives and such.

Right now, even if its old news, I just recently read about what happened to mtgox and how much money and people's lives got ripped apart because of such tragedy.

I want to know if there's a way I can store my small amount of btc in my phone so that I can "store" not in exchanges like coin base or anything similar.

Sorry if my question is kinda dumb but I'm really in the blurry when it comes to this.

Seeking for some clarity here bois!

[LoyceMobile]

Install Mycelium, Electrum or Coinomi.

[Findingnemo]

Install Mycelium, Electrum or Coinomi.

Green address and Jaxx also can be included in the best android crypto wallets.
OP here is a list for you: https://coinswitch.co/news/bitcoin-wallet-for-android (Simply anything which give private keys is good to store any amount of bitcoin).

[bullrun2024bro]

I asked myself the same question a few month ago and I used the "Choose your Wallet Option" on Bitcoin.org. The "Helper" suggests you different wallets, depending if you want to use the wallet on your Desktop or Mobil (also if you use an Android phone or an IPhone). It gives you various options to identify the perfect wallet for yourself like e.g. control, validation, transparency, environment, privacy or fees.

Link: https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet

Android:

IOS:

Source:

1. https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet?step=5&platform=android
2. https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet?step=5&platform=ios

I personally use the BRD-Wallet on my phone and I am very happy with my choice, but as always it depends on personal preferences. You can also go with the wallets Loyce suggested, all of them are fine!

Install Mycelium, Electrum or Coinomi.

Good luck finding your perfect wallet!

[hosseinimr93]

Install Mycelium, Electrum or Coinomi.

Green address and Jaxx also can be included in the best android crypto wallets.

I don't recommend Greenaddress especially for newbies.

Greenaddress doesn't give you private keys.
The default wallet in greenaddress is a 2 of 2 account. For spending bitcoins, two signatures are needed. One from user and another one from Greenaddress. If Greenaddress becomes unavailable for any reason, the user won't be able to move bitcoins unless the user has enabled nLocktime transactions. Even if nlocktime transactions has been enabled, the user needs to wait for a certain time to recover the fund.
It is possible to have a 2 of 3 account. But as it is not the default wallet, it isn't usually used especially by newbies.

In both 2 of 2 account (with nlocktime transactions) and 2 of 3 accounts, recovering bitcoins needs some knowledge of coding. That's difficult for most of users. So, I don't recommend Greenaddress.

[gentlemand]

I don't recommend Greenaddress especially for newbies.
 

Yeah. Fuck Greenaddress. I sampled it briefly and did not find it reassuring or intuitive at all. I seem to remember the desktop version of Jaxx at least having some security flaws and it looks like they haven't bothered with Segwit yet either on their latest wallet.

I've used Mycelium for years without any complaints at all. Note that is the Android version which is actively developed. Do not use it on iOS. That's abandoned.

[nakamura12]

I've been researching but somewhat failing to know how to find a way to actually store my small amounts of bitcoins in my phone (without actually using any exchange) like in the old days, people store their bitcoins in their hard drives and such.

Right now, even if its old news, I just recently read about what happened to mtgox and how much money and people's lives got ripped apart because of such tragedy.

I want to know if there's a way I can store my small amount of btc in my phone so that I can "store" not in exchanges like coin base or anything similar.

Sorry if my question is kinda dumb but I'm really in the blurry when it comes to this.

Seeking for some clarity here bois!

You can use electrum wallet. Electrum also supported android devices and you can download it on playstore or go to their official website. I use trust wallet to store either btc, eth erc20 tokens and more. You can download it from playstore and i'm sure you know what to do with the seed phrase.

[LTU_btc]

Oh, I remember times when I used Coinbase as my mobile walket and I didn't cared about security completely. But there is some good and secure wallets for mobile.
@LoyceV already mentione best available wallets. I can add few more. It's Edge (former Airbitz), BRD (former BreadWallet).
Also, another good option is Ledger Live. But obviously, first of all you need to have Ledger Nano X or Nano S hardware wallet.
Most important thing when you choose wallet - it must give you full control of your coins. Also, be careful and don't fall into phishing fake wallets.

[squatter]

In both 2 of 2 account (with nlocktime transactions) and 2 of 3 accounts, recovering bitcoins needs some knowledge of coding. That's difficult for most of users. So, I don't recommend Greenaddress.

You don't really need knowledge of coding. That's all built into the GreenAddress UI. The biggest problem is that the default wallet setup encourages (or actually may require, I can't remember) 2FA. People are extremely sloppy with 2FA -- deleting Authenticator apps, not writing down or backing up recovery tokens, etc. Then they turn around and blame app developers for it.

So, where you have constant complaints about Blockchain.info accounts being hacked, you instead have constant complaints about people locking themselves out of GreenAddress accounts.

I like the theory behind their design choices, but the implementation leaves much to be desired. As a general rule, I don't think people should be combining third party 2FA with Bitcoin wallets.

[bL4nkcode]

Not to mention, the new blockstream green wallet, recommended rather than using the greenaddress wallet.

For some reason I won't recommend using Jaxx, the fact it face security issues which leads to funds lost with hundreds of bucks.

[squatter]

Not to mention, the new blockstream green wallet, recommended rather than using the greenaddress wallet.

That whole transition has been strange and disjointed. Blockstream acquired GreenAddress a few years ago and began rebranding it to "Blockstream Green" last year. However, Blockstream Green is only available on iOS and Android. Meanwhile, GreenAddress is still pointing to the same old desktop wallets released in 2018.

Anyway, Blockstream Green is still prone to the same recovery issues as GreenAddress. They use all the same default settings. They are switching from nLockTime to a supposedly better trustless recovery method using CSV, but I don't think it's implemented yet.

One thing I appreciate about them is that Blockstream offers the 2FA service at no charge. For people who use 2FA responsibly and understand the security implications, that's a good deal. For comparison, Electrum's 2FA service provided by TrustedCoin charges 0.00005 BTC per transaction.

[odolvlobo]

I can recommend 4 different wallets for phones: Edge, BRD, Samourai, and Mycelium.

BRD is a basic wallet and is easy to use.
Edge is also easy to use. It encrypts your wallet with a username and password, and stores it so that you can access it from any device.
Samourai has some advanced privacy features.
Mycelium has a ton of features, so it might not be the best first wallet. I use Mycelium primarily for accessing my hardware wallets.

A wallet on your phone can be secure, convenient and easy to use. There really is no good reason to store bitcoins on an exchange if you aren't trading them.

[xxkaiwaxx]

Coinomi is the one i use

[yazher]

You need to be careful when storing a large amount of crypto to your phone cause sometimes they are hard to recover when something goes wrong with its motherboard. I read some posts about someone losing their BTC in a phone wallet and they didn't have some options to recover it back. You better choose the available hardware wallet with advance security.

[pooya87]

we are playing fast and loose with the term "store".
a phone wallet should only be used to carry around pocket money not as a storage. so if you are only storing small amounts that you want to have access to anywhere you go (like being outside and wanting to buy something with bitcoin) then you should use a phone wallet. otherwise stick to desktop wallets. they are a lot better and so much safer.
many of the phone wallets are closed source (such as Coinomi), some have a source code somewhere but it has nothing to do with the binaries they release!, only a handful like Electrum are open source but their phone wallets lacks a lot of features. some of these phone wallets are also relying on centralized servers that could compromise both your privacy and security.

[gentlemand]

otherwise stick to desktop wallets. they are a lot better and so much safer.

In what possible universe is a desktop wallet safer?

It certainly is if it's on a machine that has never and will never see the internet again. Linux on something connected might be OK, I don't know enough about it.

If it's on a connected Windows machine, which is what most people will settle for, you'd be leaving yourself open to a million back doors that you won't know about until you coinage is gone.

I would always choose a phone wallet over a desktop Windows wallet.

[squatter]

otherwise stick to desktop wallets. they are a lot better and so much safer.

In what possible universe is a desktop wallet safer?

It certainly is if it's on a machine that has never and will never see the internet again. Linux on something connected might be OK, I don't know enough about it.

If it's on a connected Windows machine, which is what most people will settle for, you'd be leaving yourself open to a million back doors that you won't know about until you coinage is gone.

I would always choose a phone wallet over a desktop Windows wallet.

My inclination is the exact opposite. What are you basing this on? Android phones in particular are very dangerous for Bitcoin-related activity. Vulnerabilities like this have been rampant throughout Android's history:

We recently learned that a component of Android responsible for generating secure random numbers contains critical weaknesses, that render all Android wallets generated to date vulnerable to theft. Because the problem lies with Android itself, this problem will affect you if you have a wallet generated by any Android app. An incomplete list would be Bitcoin Wallet, blockchain.info wallet, BitcoinSpinner and Mycelium Wallet.

I recommend that people stop using Android phones for anything even remotely security-sensitive. New vulnerabilities are constantly being found at both the app and operating system level. Here's another example relevant to Bitcoin users, disclosed a couple weeks ago: A new virus is attacking Google 2FA app

This is the bottom line: 87% of Android smartphones are insecure and that’s no joke

If we're going to tell people that smartphones are safe, we need to at least include the caveat that we're referring to iOS, not Android. Even then, I'm not sure that I agree.

[pooya87]

In what possible universe is a desktop wallet safer?

in a universe where:
- you don't carry around your PC in your back pocket so there is no risk of physical damage, losing it,...
- you can cut off your PC from all networks that exist but you can never cut off your phone from not connecting to some sort of network at the very least your SIM card is communicating with your service provider.
- iOS is closed source and Android is owned by Google. i don't trust either of them.
+ what @squatter said

not to mention that most phone wallets are the least popular so less used, less tested, and less reviewed that increases the risks of having bugs or even back-doors. on top of that many of them rely on centralized servers for their services while desktop wallets connect to actual nodes and are more decentralized. that is ignoring the closed source phone wallets that are the dominant choices.

[ABCbits]

Both @squatter and @pooya87 forget that majority of android smartphones are outdated and don't receive security updates, so even if a vulnerability is found and fixed, most smartphone remain insecure.
Bad people could learn known vulnerability and try to target user with outdated smartphone.

At least Windows and Linux OS got regular update, even though Windows update might break something and update availability on Linux depends on the contributor/company behind it.

[Lucius]

This is the bottom line: 87% of Android smartphones are insecure and that’s no joke

This is unfortunately true, but it's not Google's fault, but the device manufacturers themselves have the biggest responsibility, because they have a very slow release of Google updates on their phones and many users wait for months to get updates. Reason for that lies in fact that each of them (Samsung, Huawei...) need to adjust update for each of their model separately and then release it from top models down by regions/countries. I get my Android 10 update in less than 2 months after release on my Huawei which is last year top model, but some models is still waiting that update.

Therefore, it should definitely be acknowledged that all devices running Android OS are at a very disadvantage in terms of security updates, they are too slow to deliver them, which leaves enough room for hackers to exploit all the vulnerabilities. I read in article that one of advices is to use antivirus on your smartphone, which is in my opinion good move, despite the fact that most will reject it because such programs slow down the device (which is true if you don't have enough RAM), and because of the cost of such programs.

In short, don't use crypto on your smartphone unless you have a smartphone running at least Android 9 (latest version 10), and if you are in the habit of surfing suspicious sites and download apps from unreliable sources.