Bitcoin a b c
It is not a problem to keep $400 or up to $1 thousand of bitcoin on a hot wallet on your phone, but once it starts to be worth more than $4 thousand, I strongly advise you to use a "hardware wallet" like the ones I will talk about below.
The reason why I might have said that you don't need a "hardware wallet" right away if you just started using Bitcoin is because if your bitcoins aren't worth that much for now like below $400 to $900, you don't have an urgency to buy a "hardware wallet" worth $50 or more you can still use a hot wallet wallet on your phone(like Muun Wallet, Phoenix Wallet or blink), but if your $400 dollars were to become 10 times more valuable it makes a lot of sense to spend $50 of that money to buy a hardware wallet for better security. Because a $4,000 worth of bitcoin today is a $40,000 tomorrow assuming Bitcoin price keeps on going up, so plan accordingly.
For example, if you sell a house to buy bitcoin, please make sure you put the bitcoin on a "hardware wallet", because your attack level increased, and losing this much money will not feel good knowing you could have avoid it with a simple $50 hardware wallet. On that note please never tell people how much money you have on Bitcoin, that is your personal secret to you and your family.
When you have your bitcoin stored on an app like: Muun Wallet, blink, walletofsatoshi or Phoenix Wallet, these are hot wallets which means your seed phrase or password to withdraw the money are stored on your smartphone if you let someone enter it if they know your pin they can take the money or send it somewhere else, but when you have it on a " "hardware wallet" like Trezor, Jade, Bitkey or a Ledger the keywords are not stored on the phone but on the hardware wallet, and if someone finds your phone they won't be able to spend the bitcoin on it without the hardware wallet signing the transaction. At this point your phone only serves as a window to see inside but not to get inside your money.
Once you receive the hardware wallet open it, it will generate 12 or 24 words these are your wallet seed phrase, keep them safe as losing them and your wallet is equivalent to losing all your money, I suggest to use a metal seed plate to store them. The wallet will also ask you to key in your wallet pin, make sure this pin is something you can always remember since after a few trials the wallet will destroy itself. Now you will be able to view your Bitcoin address types for receiving(I suggest Taproot or Segwit address types as they are cheaper to transfer later), copy the address and past it in your Hot wallet(previous wallet) to transfer the bitcoin.
Always buy your hardware wallet from the exact manufacturer website, the lowest price I could find for a hardware wallet at the moment was the $50 trezor model one(price may differ), you don't need to get the most expensive one to be safer they all provide approximately the same level security. The next level security would be a combination of three keys together to create a Multi-Signature wallet like a 2 of 3 wallet where you need 2 wallets out of three to sign a bitcoin transaction, but that's for another article, it's much more risky and requires much more "know hows" to be done safely without losing your funds, if you still want to go ahead with multisig I suggest you to use Unchained or Casa or Nunchuk.
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