If you have completed this short exercise, you will have successfully accessed a real-world Ethereum wallet! Feel free to play around with it at your discretion. No one should send money to this wallet as anyone on the internet could have this private key now.

While the above website is the actual URL for MyEtherWallet, beware as there are a number of fake URLs that appear to be exact replicas of the real sites that are again designed to steal your private keys and your crypto. It is very easy to mask https://www.myetherwallet.com with https://www.myetherwallct.com or https://www.myethcrwallet.com in emails, Slack channels, or by just putting a textual link on top of the URL. These scams are raking in lots of money all the time! Do not fall for them.

b) Hardware Wallet. Hardware wallets can be compared with a secure dongle or RSA SecurID hardware tokens that plug into your computer. Essentially, you plug in this device to your computer in order to access and sign crypto transactions. The physical device is required and without it, you cannot send your crypto from these wallets. Two of the most common are the Ledger Nano S made in France and Trezor by SatoshiLabs out of the Czech Republic. These are generally considered very secure, but there have been scams where people have received fake ones by second hand distributors specifically designed to steal your crypto. Note, there are no known reports of these companies themselves distributing fraudulent devices. This is NOT part of their business.

c) Paper Wallet. You can run a website offline and generate a private key for your cryptocurrency of choice. You print the document holding your private key and store the document securely in a vault, safe, or under your mattress. Note most people consider this wallet to be used in the fashion adding as many funds as you like, but only withdraw once. You can only use a paper wallet via service that allows you to import your private keys. For a quick tutorial on how this is done, please check out these articles from CoinDesk.com and BitcoinPaperWallet.com.

d) Full Client. A less commonly used solution is running a full client of the blockchain. For example, you can download and run a Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchain on your local computer. In order to do this, you must have your computer connected to the internet and synced with the blockchain. If this of interest to you, please take note that the Bitcoin blockchain including databases indexes is about 170 GB and for Ethereum it is over 330 GB and growing. You also have to maintain custody of your private keys that are run on the wallet attached to your client. For up-to-date- tracking of this blockchain size, this website on bc.daniel.net.nz is an excellent source.

e) Thin Client. If you are determined to run the blockchain locally, one solution is a thin client implementation. This will allow you to interact with the blockchain while only maintaining the headers of all the blockchain transactions. It requires considerably less data than the Full Client, but still requires you to be in sync with the blockchain and maintenance of your private keys in order to access your wallet.

4) Friend equivalent. If you choose to give your crypto to a friend or ask them to invest your hard earned fiat money in crypto on your behalf, recognize that you are trusting them with the custodial management of your money. They must first be above board and someone you would trust with the crown jewels. They will more than likely be using one of the above methods for storing your crypto, which I would argue is THEIR crypto, until it is transferred to you and you take custody and overall management of it. I can’t tell you how many people I hear of who are taking this route, and really don’t understand the implications of trusting someone else with their crypto!

5) Mobile wallet equivalent. While PayPal and Venmo are touted as being great payment solutions with excellent mobile adoption, there are similarly a number of mobile wallets and web browser-enabled that will help you store and transact in your crypto. Some of these wallets include Electrum or Jaxx. While these seem convenient, I have heard of a number of hacks especially with hackers getting administrative control over your devices. For example, Android phones can be rooted so that software administrator updates can be run in the background on your device. For more information on rooting see this link here. I have heard of hackers getting access to your mobile applications via this rooting configuration and emptying out wallets. If you hold crypto on a mobile Android device that is rooted, disable rooting, or take your crypto off of these wallets immediately!

There are a few other high-priority items to address.

a. Loss of your private key. Now that we have covered many of the ways that you can maintain custody of your crypto, a burning question that many people ask is “What if I lose my private key?” There is no easy way to say this other than you have completely lost access to ALL the crypto that was in the wallet that you no longer hold the key for. That’s right COMPLETELY unrecoverable. The key is 64 hexadecimal units long. It is simply not possible to recreate your specific lost key so that you can access your funds.