The reality of losing your bitcoin is a possibility that may deter people from ever buying bitcoin, but the fact is that most bitcoin losses happen when people store their coins on exchanges rather than in their own wallet, which are outside of the exchange’s control. The bottom line is, if you don’t own your private keys, you don’t own your bitcoin.
Best Free Bitcoin Wallets
While many consider Trezor and Ledger to be the best bitcoin wallets, people who are new to bitcoin may not want to spend the money on the most secure and trustworthy wallets when they first start buying bitcoin.
Any of the 3 bitcoin wallets below are free, built by trusted groups in bitcoin and have stored and transferred bitcoin securely for thousands of people over the years.
Blue Wallet
Muun Wallet
Electrum
The privacy focused bitcoin wallet Wasabi is also free and available for IOS, Android, Linux and TOR users.
Best Bitcoin Hardware Wallets
There are two wallets that crypto currency lovers looking for the most secure and trustworthy hardware wallets always turn to and those are Ledger and Trezor.
Both wallets hold Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, ERC-20 Tokens and many other alt-coins that crypto enthusiasts buy and sell every day. The difference between the two as far as security is concerned is negligible, however, preferences on the user interfaces do vary though.
This Bitcoin Core team approved wallet, with millions of downloads and users daily, makes this wallet the one and only most will ever need on their phone.
The company is funded by bitcoin businesses using their payment and bitcoin storage solutions to securely store and transfer their bitcoin revenue. This is a huge advantage for those new to bitcoin because the same security and storage is offered on their free mobile bitcoin solution to everyone.
IOS Bitcoin Wallets
Two of the most popular and trusted iPhone bitcoin wallets currently are Breadwallet and Blockchain wallet.
Android Bitcoin Wallets
Two of the most popular and trusted free Android bitcoin wallets currently are Blockchain Wallet and Mycelium Wallet.
Desktop Bitcoin Wallets
There aren’t a LOT of reasons we personally would use a desktop wallet but for those that want to keep a bit of bitcoin on their laptop rather than in cold storage, the electrum wallet has been trusted since 2011. That’s longer than Monero has been around and it changed privacy coins forever.
We still prefer the privacy focused Wasabi Wallet mentioned above, especially if you’re a first timer looking for a trusted bitcoin wallet.
You could also download the Bitcoin Core wallet, since they’re the team that oversees the bitcoin protocol and is a wallet which is obviously trusted by many. You need over 140GB of available storage for the entire blockchain to download, so make sure to make some room before downloading it onto your laptop.
Avoid Storing Large Amounts of Crypto On Exchange Wallets
Although there are many exchanges like Coinbase and RobinHood entering the Bitcoin and Crypto Space with wallets, we HIGHLY recommend storing most (if not all) of your bitcoin on wallets which are not tied to a bitcoin exchange. The cold and hot storage options above should be enough for people to securely store digital money. Leaving funds in an exchange still means you do not technically own the funds. Just like when a bank run proves a bank doesn’t have enough money, bitcoin exchanges will occasionally run into MTGOX-type situations that nobody wants to lose their crypto in.