Best Practice for Using Btc I have recently learned about best practice for storing private keys with hardware wallets. I understand the necessary information including backups from seed phrases, the concept of cold storage, safely storing seed phrases, and having multiple HD wallets incase one goes missing, etc.
Ok. But now, I want to actually use bitcoin in the real world, because what better way to support btc than to actually use it!
So I want to have a wallet, preferably on my phone that I can use for quick and easy payments with friends and merchants in public. I plan to keep $100 or less on this account, similar to my debit account with my usual bank.
But I still want to do my best to be secure, and I don’t understand a lot of the vulnerabilities with my public keys being stored somewhere on my phone. Can someone please perhaps recommend a mobile based platform for btc transactions and outline the vulnerabilities and how I can avoid them? I understand that my hardware wallet is offline, what vulnerabilities come with my phone being online?
Example: I have heard people mention to never connect to public WiFi. How does this make me vulnerable? So when I leave the house should I disable WiFi? Are there any vulnerabilities with using 4g?
There is many wallets outhere, some of them open source that you could even compile and run into your device so you can audit the code if you don't want to trust the manufacturer.
My advice use the one you think or see works good (in my case https://blockstream.com/green/)
With the care you are proposing right now, having only what would spend.
I like to think that it's the same than having cash in our pockets, if you lose it you won't claim to anybody.
So create another separate wallet, feed it with sum funds from your hard wallet and enjoy safely. And remember to ALWAYS keep your private keys out of any connected device (at least the big wallet), never share it , never take a picture and so on.