Let us remind the reader that more freedom implies more responsibility: the characteristic of a decentralized currency is that the user becomes his own bank. It is therefore incumbent upon him to make himself the security of his money.

There are different ways to secure your cryptocurrency, it’s about securing the private encryption keys associated with your public addresses.

The wallets (literally “wallets” in French) are open-source and free software developed by the actors of these technologies, available on different platforms and operating systems.

More generally, the term “wallet” may designate both client software, the encrypted and secure file containing the addresses and their encryption keys, the devices for keeping private keys away from the Internet, or a simple piece of paper.  We should therefore say rather “key-holders”, because these solutions actually manage pairs of encryption keys: at such a Bitcoin address (public key [1] ) known to all is associated a private key (known only to the owner), to sign the transactions and therefore to prove to all network peers that you are the owner of these Alternative Cryptocurrencies.

There are different types of wallets , with their advantages

Web portfolios or online wallets:

They offer great simplicity of use, never encumber your hard disk and allow the saving as well as the automatic encrypted sending of the private keys, making them very attractive for the average user. On the other hand it is of course possible that the selected online portfolio is compromised or may be offline for technical reasons. Their ease of use as well as their flexibility is therefore counterpart a much lower level of security, especially if it is the latter that manages the generation of your private keys and centralizes their conservation; this is not really for a big investor or a business, as you may have understood, but rather for an individual who wants to shop on the Internet, send small amounts of money to relatives, etc.

Mobile wallets

These are the applications available to the smartphone user, allowing him to easily carry out his transactions both in shops in the city accepting Bitcoin and on the Internet.

The office portfolio or portfolios local

These are the software that installs on your personal computer. There are two categories: full wallets and thin clients. Full clients download the entire blockchain to the hard drive (costly in disk space and memory), making the host a complete node involved in securing the Bitcoin network. These are the safest customers because they do not require the trust of a peer to validate your transactions.

Material portfolios

These are devices protecting your assets independently and optimally, because they keep your private keys directly on an embedded chip, invulnerable to physical and logical attacks: the signature of transactions is performed “internally” by the microprocessor.