The tremendous success of Bitcoin is hardly alien to anyone nowadays. What began as a “joke currency” that could be bought in cents is now valued as much as $60,000 in today’s rate. This success has brought considerable attention to Bitcoin and made it a popular hub for investors looking to earn big.
The number of such investors has only increased in recent years with more and more people dabbling in Bitcoin as its value increases. New investors are getting motivated by the countless success stories of individuals who invested early in Bitcoin and became Bitcoin billionaires.
As of the moment we are typing this, Bitcoin’s market has slouched a lot and many new investors are looking at this as an opportunity to buy low so that they can sell high when its value rises again. The earlier you invest in Bitcoin the more profits you will reap later on – after all, Bitcoin is known as the currency of the future.
However, many new investors face a dilemma after they invest considerable amounts of money in Bitcoin – security. With hackers getting smarter and more advanced, it has become hard to insure your Bitcoin earnings away from theft. That is one of the reasons why many people are still scared of investing in Bitcoin and in this article, we aim to resolve that. We’ll go through several tips that will help you secure your account from thefts and hacks if you follow them properly.
1. Choose cold wallets over hot ones
For new investors who have just started investing in Bitcoin, the very concept of cold wallets and hot wallets may seem strange and alien. Let us explain. Hot wallets are wallets connected to the internet that store Bitcoins in them. These can be digital software loaded on your system or those provided by cryptocurrency platforms.
Cold wallets function the same as hot wallets, i.e. they store your Bitcoins in them, but have one key difference – they don’t need an internet connection. This key difference is very significant because the internet access for hot wallets makes them vulnerable to malware, hacking attacks, and phishing.
On the other hand, hackers have literally no way to access your cold wallet unless they somehow get their hands on it in real life – something that has almost zero chances of happening. With a cold wallet, you can be assured of the safety of your Bitcoin as long as you remember the keys to access it and keep it safe with you.
A cold wallet can be either a paper wallet or a hardware wallet. Paper wallets are printed papers that have the keys to access your Bitcoin account written on them. While they are super secure, you need to ensure they are kept away from humidity, fire, and prying eyes. Hardware wallets are also amazing alter-natives that allow quick and easy Bitcoin transactions – all you need to do is remember the key to access them and plug them into your system when you need to transact.
2. Ensure anonymity at all costs
One of the most amateur mistakes many Bitcoin investors are guilty of is declaring their Bitcoin success, or the number of Bitcoins they have, on public platforms and social media sites. While the need to share your success with your friends and family members is understandable by us, it is not the case for everyone else.
Hackers are always on the lookout for such people and when they find their target, they do several phishing attacks on them until they get what they want – access to your account. Malware attacks aren’t uncommon either. There are various ways that a hacker --executes their attacks but one of the most popular ones is sending their targets an innocent link, photo, or video that actually has malware inside it.
Clicking on these files directly leaves your system vulnerable to attacks and thefts. Posting on social media about your Bitcoin venture achieves nothing for you and only serves to leak your IP address to people that shouldn’t know about it. Even in offline conversations, you shouldn’t go talking about how many Bitcoins you have and what type of wallets you keep them in.
If you have a cold paper wallet and you tell it to other people, there is a chance that your paper wallets might get stolen and easily misused. Additionally, if your accounts are linked to your phone number as a security factor, a thief can easily port it to their phone and use it to access your cryptocurrency accounts.
3. Create different emails and accounts for each exchange
While it is extremely convenient and easy to have all your Bitcoins on one exchange platform, we strongly advise against doing so. Consider this scenario – you open your account on an exchange platform where' you do most of your transactions on. Let’s assume the details of your account on that platform somehow get leaked and hackers jump on the chance and hack it.
Obviously, you will end up losing all your Bitcoins just because you didn’t diversify your investments. As the saying goes, don’t put all your eggs into a single nest. Exactly on that basis, you need to ensure that you put all your “eggs” into several different “nests” so you have a backup in case one of your eggs gets stolen.
This is what many professional Bitcoin investors do as a safeguard to ensure the maximum security of their funds. It’s also necessary that you don’t use the same google account for all the exchange platforms. Make a unique email for each platform and put a series of random characters as the passwords. Write these passwords down on a paper that stays with you so that you don’t end up forgetting them at the time of need!
It is also a good idea to enable 2FA on every exchange so that you don’t end up becoming the victim of a clever phishing attack. If you follow all these steps religiously, your Bitcoin will always be safe and sound with you from the clutches of devious hackers.
Conclusion
There are various things you should ensure while investing in Bitcoin and keeping your Bitcoins safe from hackers is one of them. We hope this article helped you with just that and if it did, please consider following our website for regular updates as it will help us out immensely.