How to protect your bitcoins in the best way in this 2017?

The choice of cryptocurrencies or electronic currencies is becoming stronger as a mechanism for the purchase of products and services, not only on the Internet but also in some businesses that have begun to accept this means of payment. It is for this reason that we have already witnessed different types of threats that try to compromise security and obtain some profit related to the theft of bitcoins, or the use of the resources of the machine to mine these cryptocurrencies.

There are some tools to protect bitcoins and keep them safe. These can be divided into three categories: cold storage, hardware wallets and the multisignature option.

Each of these categories has a particular feature, which serves to increase security for the user. In the case of cold storage refers to keeping a copy of bitcoins offline to prevent it from being stolen if someone can access the device where the wallet is housed over the Internet, among these is Armory which is quite good.

Hardware wallets, on the other hand, are devices designed to encrypt the user codes. These two options have in common the fact of being most of the time in offline environments, while the multisignature option implements the need for multiple keys to authorize a transaction, if you want to use this mode we recommend Bitxoxo.

The multi-signature address is related with more than one ECDSA private key. The simplest type is an m-of-n address - it is associated with n private keys, and sending bitcoins from this address requires signatures from at least m keys. A multi-signature transaction is one that sends funds from a multi-signature address.

The main use case is to greatly increase the difficulty of stealing the coins. With a 2-of-2 address, you can keep the two keys on separate machines, and then theft will require compromising both, which is very difficult - especially if the machines are as different as possible (eg, one pc and one dedicated device , or two hosted machines with a different host and OS).