Bitcoin-Reliability {Post-30}

The whole centralized aspect of Bitcoins brings a debilitating effect to it and that is reliability. The wallet is the one place where your Bitcoins stay, there is no backup unless you make one. Real world has banks that offer insurance but none of the applications you download or the web-services
you opt for gives you any guarantee. Quite simply because they can’t, while the transactions can be tracked easily the identity of the person owning the account cannot be unless they choose to. So that being said, the software based clients hosted on your machines are the safest. You can make plenty of backups and sync them whenever you make a transaction. The probability of losing all backups simultaneously is pretty low. Mobile apps are similarly reliable but certain apps were removed from their respective stores [Coinbase was removed from the App store] so that’s there. This doesn’t mean loss of Bitcoins but those who’d downloaded it could still use it. Also losing your mobile phone meant you’d lose your Bitcoins to some lucky pickpocket.
Websites can go down at any moment and should be used as an intermediary if you care about privacy. Hosting your Bitcoins solely on a web service is the least recommended option.

Storing Bitcoins - Wallets {Post-29}

Image taken from Coindesk

Now that the gloomy, boring and rather discouraging part about trading is over, let’s get into the thick of the whole trading business. Before you start with anything you’d want someplace to store your Bitcoins. While real world currency has a whole centralized system in place the digital currency is more decentralized.

The first step is to get a wallet for yourself. The wallet is from where you
send and receive Bitcoins. There are multiple websites and software that allow you to set up a wallet. But you need to remember that with all the crackdown on various services a third party system could go down any day and with that all your Bitcoins will disappear. That’s a worst case scenario but something that has been happening. There are three types of wallets you can go with.

1. Software based
These are software that you download onto
your system and let’s you start immediately. There are plenty of software available with Bitcoin-Qt, MultiBit, Armory

and Electrum being the most popular ones.

2. Mobile wallets
Adding an extra layer of flexibility gives
you the option of carrying your Bitcoin
wallet around with you on your smartphone. Most of these clients are free and
some of them link up to your NFC so you
can pay using the same at stores that
accept Bitcoins.

3. Web-service
If you don’t want to worry about hosting
your precious Bitcoins on your personal
computer or mobile device then you have
the option of web-services where all you
need to do is make an account.