A
fter peaking at the end of 2017 and subsequently fading in popularity, cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin again experienced a more modest jump in 2019.
As this happened, so did the number of published hacking events. Given that many investors are new to the system and may not know how to protect their investments, hackers are coming up with ingenious ways to steal money.
Some of the most notorious thefts were those that took place before our eyes: some hacks even rudely redirected tokens linked from one wallet to another.
Victims watch their tokens being stolen away from them without doing anything about it.
Users may lose bitcoins and other cryptocurrency criteria as a result of theft, computer failure, loss of access keys and more.
Cold storage (or offline wallets) is one of the safest methods of holding bitcoins, as these wallets are not available online. Hardware wallets are potentially even safer, although users run the risk of losing access to their bookmarks if they miss or forget their keys.
In the same way that we store money or cards in a physical wallet, bitcoins are also stored in a wallet – a digital wallet.
The digital wallet can be based on hardware or the web. The wallet can also be located on a mobile device, on the computer desktop, or stored by printing private keys and addresses used to access paper. But how safe are any of these digital wallets?
The answer to this depends on how the user manages the portfolio.
Each wallet contains a set of private keys, without which the owner of bitcoin does not have access to the currency.
The biggest threat to the security of bitcoin is the individual user, who may lose the private key or steal the private key.
Without the private key, the user will never see his bitcoins again. In addition to losing the private key, the user can also lose their bitcoin through computer failures (hard drive crashes), hacking, or physical loss of the computer where the digital wallet is located.
