What is a Bitcoin Wallet? Different Types of Bitcoin Wallet

Bitcoin WalletsCrypto EducationLearn Blockchain

On Sep 16, 2019

Bitcoin is a virtual cryptocurrency that can only accessible on the internet and can not be transferred offline.

As bitcoin is the currency or money then it must be stored somewhere else in order to keep them hold for a long time.

So there are some different types of bitcoin wallets available in the market that allows users to store bitcoins and spend them whenever needed.

Every type of bitcoin wallet will provide a different way to store and access the bitcoin on them, and every type of bitcoin wallet is used for their specific purposes by the users.

These different types of wallets have a different level of security according to their different levels of use by bitcoin users.

We know that the bitcoin rate is increasing continuously with time in long term aspects by which the bitcoin users wanted to store their bitcoins for the long term in order to get some massive gain. So the bitcoin users should have some good knowledge of the bitcoin wallets in order to store their bitcoins securely for the long term.

In this post, you will read about the following topics:

What is a bitcoin wallet
Different types of bitcoin wallets
Paper Wallet
Multi-Signature Wallet
Brain Wallet
Vanity wallet
Bulk wallet

What is a Bitcoin Wallet?

A bitcoin wallet is a software program that allows you to control your bitcoins for sending, receiving and viewing the balance history.

Basically, the bitcoin is stored on the bitcoin address and this bitcoin address can only be accessed by its private key. So the bitcoin wallet used this bitcoin address and private key combination, and thus provides an easy user interface to the users where they can send and receive bitcoin as well as can watch the bitcoins stored on the bitcoin address.

You can also check the bitcoin balance and transaction history of your bitcoin address at the blockchain.info and https://blockstream.info/

Different types of Bitcoin Wallet

Here are the different types of bitcoin wallets given below:

Bitamp Bitcoin Wallet

What is a Bitcoin Wallet? Different Types of Bitcoin Wallet 1

Bitamp is an open-source, client-side, non-custodial web wallet of Bitcoin that allows you to send, receive, and store your bitcoins securely on the blockchain.

This wallet provides you the full control of your funds by providing you the private keys or wallet seed.

The Bitamp wallet has a good User Interface and is very easy to get started where it doesn’t take any personal information from users in order to use its services.

Bitamp wallet is created by using the latest technology and with the best security practices available. Basically, Bitamp wallet operations are normally performed locally in your web browser by using the javascript. The Bitamp wallet technology is designed to keep Your wallet seed or private key safe and secure from any type of hacking attack where it never transmitted, stored, or saved the seed anywhere that provides you the full control of your Bitcoin. You are the only one who responsible to securely store your wallet seed or private key with offline backup. Hence it is not possible for Bitamp to recover any lost seed or private key for any user.

Features:

Anonymous: Bitamp wallet doesn’t store your wallet seed, private key, IP address or browser details, and any other private information. There is no email address and any private information required to use the Bitamp wallet services. It also allows you to access your account from your home where you can also use VPN or Tor to use this wallet.
Instant: The Bitamp wallet allows you to transfer your funds instantly to any location in the world. It allows you to transfer money very easily and very fast while banks usually take several days for the same amount of money transfer.
Worldwide: You can send your money anywhere in the world using Bitamp wallet. There are no border restrictions to use or send money using this wallet. It just costs you a little amount for sending money throughout the world disregard distance dependency.
Self-sovereignty: You are the only one who controls your wallet keys, and Bitamp company does not hold or access your keys that means if you lose your keys then your bitcoin won’t be recovered. Bitamp wallet provides your financial independence by giving control of your funds directly in your hands. Your Bitcoins Your keys.
24h Active Support: Bitamp Bitcoin wallet provide 24h live support to its users.

Advantages

Good User Interface
Easy to use,
Very good privacy
good company reputation,
feature-rich,
beginner-friendly,
Open-source
Good customer support

Official Website: Bitamp.com

Onion Site (Tor): bitamptortcbtgit.onion

Source Code: GitHub

Contact: support@bitamp.com

Guarda Wallet

Guarda is a multi-currency non-custodial wallet known for its versatility, hardiness, and user-friendly, clean interface. Guarda currently supports more than 45 major blockchains and over 10,000 cryptocurrency tokens. The storages come in Web, Desktop, Chrome Extension, and Mobile Versions – all of them being cross-platform for the users to sync their wallets easily. Besides, it is possible to connect the Ledger Nano S device to manage the funds stored on a hardware wallet in Guarda Wallet’s interface.

Unique features:

Custody-free policy. You are the only owner of your funds. Guarda team believes in decentralization and conscious fund management, which absolutely resonates in the core of their product.
Wide range of supported coins and tokens. Guarda offers lightweight storages for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Ripple XRP, Ethereum Classic, Zcash, Monero, and more. Guarda Wallet support all token including ERC-20 (ETH and ETC), ERC-721, BEP-2, TRC10, TRC20, WAVES, OMNI, EOS
Guarda multi-currency wallets are available in Web, Desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux), Mobile (iOS, Android), and Chrome Extension versions.
Guarda wallets have built-in cryptocurrency exchange and purchase features, as well as a range of currency-specific features.
The wallet’s 24/7 support line is one of the most efficient on the market.
Guarda also supports Bitcoin MultiSignature Wallets

Official Website – https://guarda.com/

Source Code – https://github.com/guardaco

1 Paper Wallet

Experts Choice – Yes

Security: Highly Secured, Full Safe from online attacks

Purpose: For Long Timeframe Cold Storage of Bitcoins

Ease of Use: Very easy to create, easy to spend bitcoins

What is a Paper Wallet?

A paper wallet is a piece of physical paper that contains the bitcoin address as well as the private key of this bitcoin address.

You can use the bitcoin address on the paper wallet to deposit bitcoins in the bitcoin wallet and you can use the private key on the paper wallet in order to spend the bitcoins from the bitcoin wallet. But you can not spend the bitcoins directly with the private key (only developers have the knowledge to do that) as you have to use some third party wallets like electrum that support private keys to access your Bitcoins.

Normally paper wallet also contains the QR codes of the bitcoin address and associated private key that can be scanned easily in order to send or receive bitcoins in the bitcoin wallet.

How to generate a Paper Wallet? – Visit here

There are many methods to generate the paper wallet where BitAddress or Bitcoinpaperwallet are open source services that allow bitcoin users to generate a complete tamper-resistant paper wallet by creating some randomness through mouse movement. The generated bitcoin paper wallet can be printed directly.

You can also generate a Paper wallet using a 6 sided dice by rolling it 99 times and can generate with 16 sided hexadecimal dice by rolling it 64 times. You have to record all outcomes that will give you a long number which is a randomly generated private key, you can use this key to find the bitcoin address belongs to this private key then you have done it.

If not dice then you can also use simply a two-sided coin by throwing it 256 times and records all outcomes.

Generating paper wallets using a physical dice and a physical coin is a very strongly secured method that can never be hacked if you won’t do any mistakes from your side.

Your Keys, Your Bitcoin
Not Your Keys Not Your Bitcoin

2 Multisig Wallet

Experts Choice – Yes

Security: Ultra Secured, Full Safe from Targeted attacks

Purpose: Bitcoin wallet controlled by a group or a company

Ease of Use: normally easy to create but required signs of all partners to spend funds

What is a Multisig Wallet?

Multisignature or Multisig is a type of bitcoin wallet that is normally controlled by more than one person, and a single person can never spend the bitcoins alone from the Multisig bitcoin wallet.

Every partner of created the Multisig bitcoin wallet can receive bitcoins or can see the balance in the bitcoin wallet alone but for doing a transaction or for sending bitcoins from the bitcoin wallet every partner must be signed that transaction.

Basically, when a user going to spend bitcoins from a normal bitcoin wallet then only one signature from a single private key owned by that user is required, but in case of Multisig bitcoin wallet there are more than one signatures from two or more private keys owned by different users will be required.

How to create Multisig wallet – click here

Usually, Multisig bitcoin wallets are used by those companies and organizations that have two or more owners who are controlling the funds.

Multisig bitcoin wallets provide an ultra layer of security to users, a group of users, companies, institutions, and organizations where funds remain safe even after one of the partners did fraud or one of the keys got lost or stolen or hacked.

One can create a Decentralized cold storage vault using the 2-of-3 type Multisig bitcoin wallet and it is not much difficult to create it.

A combination of the Bitcoin Paper wallet and the Multisig Bitcoin wallet is the world’s top-level security wallet that can never be hacked in any situation except by the mistakes have done from your side.

3 Brain Wallet

Experts choice – No

Security: Very weak security, Easily hacked by guessing

Purpose: Storing Bitcoin in Brain Memory by memorizing seed passphrase

Ease of Use: Bitcoin Brain wallet is easy to create, easy to store, and easy to spend bitcoins from it

What is a Brain Wallet?

A brain wallet is the type of bitcoin wallet that is based on the concept of storing bitcoins in the user’s own mind by memorizing the seed passphrase instead of storing seed somewhere else.

As we know that bitcoins are stored on the bitcoin address and can only be spent by using the private key of that address. But a private key is a very long string of random characters that are very difficult to memorize by a normal person.

Hence bitcoin brain wallet’s private key is generated from a seed passphrase by using the SHA256 hash of this seed passphrase which is a short string of characters provided by the user itself that can be easily memorized by the user.

The brain wallets seem to be much secured as only your brain knew about the private keys and hackers can not hack your bitcoin wallet until you tell them the private keys, but the main problem arises when a user used a passphrase that can be guessed easily by hackers in this case the users can lose their bitcoins very easily and that’s why experts not recommended the bitcoin brain wallet to the users. Also if a user trying to use a complex seed passphrase then there is a great probability of forgetting the seed passphrase by the user which results in the permanent loss of bitcoins.

How to Create a Brain Wallet?

There are a lot of programs and websites that provide free services to the users in order to create the bitcoin brain wallet by using their platforms.

One of the most popular and widely used open-source JavaScript Client-Side Bitcoin Wallet Generator website to create a bitcoin brain wallet is Bitaddress.org. You can also download its source code from Github and can run that code offline to create a bitcoin brain wallet without connecting to the internet.

4 Vanity Wallet

Experts Choice – No

Security: Low Security and weak Privacy

Purpose: To obtained the VIP bitcoin address with your initials, Just For Show Off and to increase Brand Reputation

Ease of Use: Difficult to generate with normal PC

What is a Vanity Wallet?

A vanity wallet is a type of bitcoin wallet that contains a bitcoin address with a string of alphanumerical characters by including a personalized human-readable message in that bitcoin address in order to share with anyone wishing to send funds.

How to generate a Vanity Wallet?

1. The first most trusted and secure way to generate a bitcoin vanity wallet is to use the open-source Vanitygen program.

You can use the Vanitygen program to generate the bitcoin vanity address offline from your personal computer. This program will generate a vanity address started with your provided initials by using CPU and GPU power of your computer. It will generate the bitcoin vanity address as fast as your computer processing, and if your computer processing is slow then it may take a very long time to generate your bitcoin vanity address.

For the Github directory of Vanitygen program visit here

You can also download the Vanitygen program here

You can read the bitcoin experts comments on Vanitygen bitcointalk thread

2. The second most trusted and secure way to generate the bitcoin vanity wallet is to use open-source JavaScript Client-Side Bitcoin Wallet Generator website Bitaddress.org.

The bitaddress.org website allows users to generate their own bitcoin vanity address by adding their initials in the bitcoin address where users can also download its source code from the Github and can run the website totally offline without connecting your computer to any network. By running the website offlline user have the ability to generate bitcoin vanity address in a secure environment.

Bitaddress official website – https://www.bitaddress.org

Bitaddress Github – https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org

Bitaddress Source Code – Click here

5 Bulk Wallet

Expert Choice – Yes

Security: Normal security, Good privacy

Purpose: Used for doing a number of payments to a number of addresses, ex – E-commerce website’s bitcoin payments of users, decentralized exchange, coin swap exchange

Ease of Use: Difficult to use

What is a Bulk Wallet?

A Bulk Wallet is a type of bitcoin wallet that contains a large set of the combination of private keys and bitcoin addresses that controlled by a programmed bot.

The bitcoin Bulk wallet is mostly used by the e-commerce websites in order to manage the bitcoin payments of its users.

The decentralized exchanges and the coin swap exchanges are also used bitcoin Bulk wallets in order to manage a large number of transactions of the users.

How to Create a Bulk Wallet?

There are a number of ways available for users to create the bitcoin Bulk wallet for their personal use as well as for the company use.

The simple, easiest, and very secure way to create the bitcoin Bulk wallet is to use the open-source JavaScript Client-Side Bitcoin Wallet Generator Bitaddress.org website by running it on an offline personal computer.

Running bitaddress.org offline in a live running Linux operating system is a very secure and tamper-resistant way of generating the bitcoin Bulk wallet.

As per the history, bitaddress.org had not suffered from any type of attack and it has very good reviews from bitcoin experts and users. You can do your own research in order to make yourself aware and safe.

Bitaddress official website – https://www.bitaddress.org

Bitaddress Github – https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org

Bitaddress Source Code – Click here

The traditional approach to accepting bitcoins on your website requires that you install the official bitcoin client daemon (“bitcoind”). Many website hosting packages don’t support installing the bitcoin daemon. Also, running the bitcoin daemon on your web server means your private keys are hosted on the server and could get stolen if your web server is hacked. When using a Bulk Wallet you can upload only the bitcoin addresses and not the private keys to your web server. Then you don’t have to worry about your bitcoin wallet being stolen if your web server is hacked.
– Bitaddress.org