With all apologies to ZZ Top - as you gain assets in crypto its important to keep those assets safeguarded. There are a number of options for asset management.

I will be covering both software and hardware wallets and how to best use them as well as number of tips for security.

I can be reached by email at mcintosh@genwealthcrytpo.com and on twitter at @McIntoshFinTech. Looking forward to hearing from you!

https://genwealthcrypto.com

Hey, everyone. No one on this podcast is a financial advisor and all information presented

in this podcast is for informational purposes only. Now that we have the legal stuff out

of the way, let's jump on in. Welcome to the Generational Wealth with Cryptocurrency podcast.

I'm your host McIntosh. And today we're going to be talking about your cryptocurrency wallet.

In the past, we've mentioned several times on several different episodes, I believed,

about wallets for cryptocurrency. And there are several different kinds. And we're going

to discuss, first of all, I'm going to cover the different kinds of wallets, how you can

use them. And then we'll cover when you should use them, because I think that's important

as well. There are basically two different kinds of wallets. You can have a hardware

wallet, meaning one that's actually hardware, it's physical. Typically, a hardware wallet

like this is going to be a USB based device that's got some additional circuitry in it.

And it provides a very, very secure form of storage, you can not have it attached to your

computer, you can have it not be online, and available most of the time, only when you

need it. And therefore, just from that aspect alone, it makes it very secure. So in addition

to hardware wallets, of course, we have software wallets, there's three different kinds of

software wallets, a web based wallet, like Metamask would be a prime example, it's a

browser extension so that you simply utilize it in your browser. There is a desktop wallet

works simply a desktop application. And then also what that would run on your phone, whether

that's Android, or iOS. These of course, they're going to be online virtually all the time,

unlike a hardware wallet. That, in my opinion, gives them well, it certainly gives them a

wider profile of attack. Since they're online, they are a little bit more difficult to maintain

safely. In addition, when you're reading about wallets, or hearing about wallets, you'll

hear the term hot or cold wallet, hot wallet would be one of these software wallets, unless

you happen to be running it on a disconnected computer, a computer that's not on the internet,

it's going to be online available, you can use it to buy and sell currency, you can use

it to send to other people, that kind of thing. The cold wallet, on the other hand, is disconnected

from the internet. And of course, that does make it much more difficult to, to hack. Now

a cold wallet would typically be a hardware wallet, you can almost use those two words,

a hardware wallet can be online, of course, you, you do have to interface with your computer

in order to transfer money out of it. So it's online then, but typically it would operate

in a cold, cold wallet state, so to speak. It's not connected to the internet. All right.

So now that we've laid some basics, let's talk about some specifics. I'm actually going

to do this in reverse order. We'll talk about software wallets for just a second. Talk about

what are the most common ones. I actually mentioned it already metamask. It is an Ethereum

based wallet. So if you're dealing with an Ethereum currency, whether that's Ethereum

or any of the other currencies that are derived from it, then it will be able to handle that.

It does not handle Bitcoin. I want to make that clear. So you cannot store your Bitcoin

on a metamask wallet. It is what they call an open source wallet. And what that means

is that the code for the wallet itself is available online. You can review it if you're

a coder. Well, anybody can review it. If you're a coder, you can look at it and, you know,

maybe you find a bug. You can, the idea is if we make it visible to enough people that

it will help resolve bugs before they're utilized by attackers. For metamask, that certainly

proved to be very true. There's been no major hacks of metamask software. And the most common

attack, the most common risk facing a metamask wallet is actually what they call a phishing

attack, which is really what would be classified as a social engineering hack. And that means

somebody is going to try and steal some information from you, like your password, in order to

access your wallet. Now, how do they do that? They they try and trick you essentially. Now

there's hundreds of ways to do that. When I was doing the research for this episode,

I actually came across this list on the metamask website that might be very helpful, especially

if you've never dealt with this kind of stuff. So rule number one, I'm going to run through

these real quick. We'll discuss some of them very briefly, but real rule number one, never

share your 12 words secret recovery phrase or seed phrase or private keys. So your private

keys should be stored away as well as your secret recovery phrase. Understand that the

secret recovery phrase, the seed phrase can actually be used to regenerate your wallet.

So you you want to protect it just like a set of keys. These are generated during the

initial setup of your the initial setup of your wallet, along with a set of public keys.

The public keys are the only thing that you should be giving to anybody. Do not ever give

these out. Again, do not ever give these out. Beware of impersonators rule number two. Okay,

people impersonate people. Oh, I'm here from metamask trying to help you fix your problem,

blah, blah, blah. Oh, I need your private key or your seed phrase. Don't give it to

them. Rule number three, never DM with somebody offering to help DM is direct message. So

what they're talking about is when somebody will get on a forum, and they'll say something

like, Oh, I need help with my wallet. And then somebody will say, Hey, I can help you

with that. And then they start DM you. And they're not from metamask metamask. In fact,

there's an explicit rule down here about support. They don't. That's not what they would be

doing. But they'll DM you and then they'll start acting like they're helping you. And

really, they're just trying to get your private key or your seed phrase. Never enter your

seed secret seed phrase or private key into any on website online. Of course, that goes

along with keep your private key safe. And your seed phrase. Don't be putting it on a

website. The only place you should be putting that is in metamask itself. Okay, never trust

someone asking you to authenticate your wallet. Rule number five. Again, they're fishing you

they're trying to get you to do something so that they can get access to your wallet.

Never import your wallet. Rule number six. Never import into your wallet, a private key

or seed phrase that someone gave you. So they're trying to get you to load their keys so that

they can steal the tokens out of yours. And then so they drain your wallet and then they

would then remove. They would actually then move the tokens from that first wallet to

a new wallet, which they only had the private key. See, they turned around gave you the

private keys. So it's kind of a two step attack. It's kind of tricky. Again, somebody's giving

you private keys. Somebody's giving you a seed phrase. Don't import that into metamask

or your software wallet in general. So, you know, these are for any software wallet, not

just metamask. Metamask happens to be one of the most popular ones and it's used by

a lot of people. But this would be for any any software wallet. Okay, rule number seven.

Metamask support will never DM to help you. There you go. Right. So this is metamask specific,

but they will not DM you. If somebody's direct messaging you, you can ignore that. Rule number

eight. Do not join Discord servers, WhatsApps groups. I cannot say that word. WeChat, Telegram

channels or Twitter DMs. They're all scams. Again, metamask doesn't support these. Metamask

is not going to direct message you. Metamask. That's just not the way it works. Rule number

nine. Support us. Don't support scammers. Report scammers. Help keep the community safe. Rule

number 10. Remember, beware of fake websites. The official website is HTTPS metamask.io.

There was an impersonation attack done, not on metamask, but on another site, which was

fairly complex. But basically it showed in your browser that it was an unsecure website

and people went to it and plugged in their stuff and had their accounts strained. You

have to be careful people. Okay. You should always be looking when you log into the website,

is it secure? Does it show up properly? What I'm talking about with secure is the little

lock in Chrome that shows in the upper left corner. Well, it shows just to the left of

the host name or the site name. Sorry. And last, rule number 10. The official help is

support.metamask.io. So that's the help site for metamask specifically. Again, don't go

to any of these other, there's other places you can ask questions or whatever, but they're

not official support channels. People, they just, it's, the internet is crazy and it's

not just with cryptocurrency, but with all the scam stuff. Okay. You've got to be careful.

Protect those private keys. Protect those seed phrases. Those are the keys to your,

to your bank. Okay. Another thing, they're never going to ask you, any company is never

going to ask you to reset your account or get your password. Those passwords are your

passwords. They should not be shared with anyone. Same goes for your seed phrase. All

right. Remember, just to emphasize this, your seed phrase, in this case, it's a 12 word

phrase that can access your account. You can actually set up a new metamask wallet with

this. Okay. That would then have the same information. It's a way that you can move

between computers. You should never, never give that out. And if you do and somebody,

if somebody sets it up and moves that money off of your account, it's gone. You can't

get it back. That's just, that is decentralization. There's no way of rewinding that. There's

no way of getting it back. All right. Moving on. All right. Now, so that is the single

most popular wallet for Ethereum. What about for Bitcoin? Of course, Bitcoin has been around

longer. There are some different software wallets that are available for Bitcoin. I

picked out a couple of the most common ones to talk about. One's called Wasabi, as in

the Japanese, very hot. That's not a sauce, but dip, I guess. And then Electrum is another

one. E-L-E-C-T-R-U-M. These are both open source, which I feel frankly is very important.

The opposite of that would be closed source. A company that writes up code, deploys some

binary. You don't have access to that code. You can't tell what it's going on and you

don't know what's going on. So having it open source with a large audience, which both of

these do have large audiences, it really helps keep these major hacks from happening. So,

you know, the same things go for Wasabi for Electrum that does for Metamask or any other

software wallet. You're going to have your keys. You're going to have a seed phrase.

Those things you keep safe. Do not let people know what those are. They're the keys to your

bank account. I don't know how else to emphasize it. You have to be careful about that. Now,

the hardware wallet. We'll talk about hardware wallets now. There's two major models. There's

other models. These are the two most common. So to keep things a little shorter, I concentrated

on them. There's two major brands, Ledger and Trezor. They each have two models, a Nano

S and Nano X for the Ledger and a Model 1 and a Model T for Trezor. I'm not going to

debate whether one's better than the other. You can do your own research. There are pros

and cons of each. I think both of them will do a very good job of taking care of your

hardware wallet. Now, one of the things that comes to mind when I start thinking about

a hardware wallet is, oh my gosh, what happens if it burns in a fire? What happens if it

falls out of my pocket? What happens if it gets smashed? What happens if I lose it? Just

like with a software wallet, you'll have two things. You'll have a password, private key,

and you'll have seed phrase. Now, to access it, someone will need one of those two things.

If they don't have that, they can't access it. So if you drop it out of your pocket and

somebody picks it up and it has a million dollars on it, it's okay. Now, I think you

should keep a million dollar ledger wallet safe, but that's your business, not mine.

But what does happen if it gets destroyed? Can you recover that? Yes, you can. Buy a

new wallet, restore it with a seed phrase, you're good to go. That's what the seed phrase

is for. It is used for that recovery process. They start at, I don't know, 80 bucks or something

to go up from there. You can spend a decent amount on these. But if we're talking about

true, more than a few hundred dollars, you really probably ought to think about this

very carefully. I'm not going to discuss, I mean, they've got interfaces, they plug

into your computer. You can store actually not just Bitcoin or just Ethereum. These tend

to cover a wide range of things you'll want to check. I actually checked, for example,

Solana, and I don't own any Solana, but it's fairly new. It's kind of the point. It was

already available in one of the hardware wallets. If you have a large holding of some coin,

you certainly want to check on that. If it's a newer coin, I don't know, whatever it may

be. Now, let's back up for just a minute and let's talk about, to wrap this up, what the

real plan is. How do you move through this? If you're a beginning investor and you only

have a few hundred, a few thousand dollars maybe, it's okay to keep all of your money

on Kraken or Coinbase or whatever. They have good security. You don't own the keys. You'll

hear the statement. I'll say it. It gets said a lot. Not your keys, not your Bitcoin, not

your currency. That's true. They do own the keys. You just have a password and a login,

but Coinbase, multi-billion dollar company, public traded, they're not going to steal

your Bitcoin. They have very good, will they ever get hacked? It's possible, but they keep

over 90% of their assets. I think it's actually 98% in cold storage. It would be virtually

impossible for that to be hacked. You're not going to lose your money on Coinbase. If I

only had a little bit, I wouldn't worry about it. I'd put it on Coinbase, whatever. Now,

let's say you're in this for the long haul. You're DCAing your money. You're building

up your wealth. Things are going good. Bitcoin is at 65,000. Ethereum is at 4,500. Things

are cranking. Maybe you got 10,000. Maybe you got more. You need to start thinking about

a hardware wallet, maybe even sooner than that. Here's what I would do. This is my opinion.

This is not financial advice. If I'm just buying coin, I'm not trading, so I'm going

to break this down two different ways. If I'm just buying coin, I would have an account

on a major exchange that I do my purchase on, and then periodically I would lump up

those tokens and I would move them to a hardware wallet that I had purchased and set up. I

would keep the majority of my money offline, if not virtually all of it. There's no reason

to leave it on that exchange and even be worried about it. Now, if you're a trader, it's a

little bit different because you do have to keep money online to trade. That's the way

that it works. You're going to have to have a software wallet. Now, you can do your trading

on Coinbase. You can do your trading on Kraken or whatever the exchange is, but you're most

likely going to want to set up a wallet that you use to handle that. I would recommend

Metamask for an Ethereum-based setup, and one of these others, Wasabi or Electrum, for

a Bitcoin-based setup. They're certainly some of the most common ones around. Metamask,

without a doubt, is on the Ethereum side. Wasabi and Electrum are both very popular

as well and have good track records. Keep what you need in those to do your trading

with. Don't keep a lot of money online at any one time. Keep the majority. Be like Coinbase,

just like I said, 98%. They keep it in cold storage. Keep as much as you can in cold storage.

Keep what you need on that hot wallet or on that exchange. I hope that makes sense. Pretty

straightforward. Just please, please, people, be careful. There are people out there trying

to steal your money. I'm sorry. It's true. That's the world that we live in. All right.

Now, news. There wasn't a whole lot of news this week. I did want to mention one thing,

unfortunately, as an example. You got to be careful, guys. I'm going to read through this.

I heard about this when it happened. Pretty much everybody that's listening to this has

probably heard of this Squid Games movie on Netflix, and I'm not going to provide any

commentary on that, but crypto being what crypto is, somebody went and made a token

based on it. Apparently, it's not backed by Netflix or any other involved parties, but

somebody went out. They made a Squid Games token. Now, this token hasn't been online very

long. I'm not exactly sure when it was created. It looks like maybe late last month, but less

than two weeks after the token had launched. I honestly, until this thing happened, I'd

never even heard of it, but somehow it happened. Two weeks after the token launched, it reached

a peak of $2,850, and the token crashed by over 99.99%. At the time that this was written

on November the 2nd, it was worth $0.003028, so less than one cent, a third of a cent roughly.

It was just liquidated. What happened is that on November the 1st, the people who had bought

the token, gone up in value from one cent up to obviously these crazy ridiculous levels,

found out they were unable to sell. Apparently, there was this anti-dumping mechanism that

was built into the contract that meant that people couldn't sell. The investor funds got

moved. People lost somewhere in the neighborhood of $6 million or so in total. It's all a big

mess. Of course, the developer, investor people, they all just disappeared, and they'll keep

that money. That's just the way it works. One place that I read said that the contract

was available. You could read it. This actually was all written into it, and it was just right

there broad daylight, and nobody bothered with it. It's this FOMO mentality if you're

missing out. Oh, it's the new thing. It's the hype. It's going crazy. Be careful. First

of all, if you're going to invest in this or Shiba Inu or one of these unproven tokens,

don't do it with the main part of your assets. You never know what's going to happen. What

happens if Dogecoin drops to a cent tomorrow? All your money that you have in it is gone.

Is that going to materially hurt you? I hope not. I'm not worried about Bitcoin or Ethereum

or ADA or some of these other tokens that have been around for a long time. They've

got a track record. They've got a proven, reasonably transparent development process,

all this kind of stuff. You're not going to see something like that happen on these projects.

On a new project like this, especially, I mean, good night. I don't know. This kind

of stuff I just scratched my head at. But just a warning, it is the news for the week.

There really isn't actually anything else. It's actually been a very boring week in the

market. Everything's just kind of going sideways, kind of the same way it has for the last three

weeks. A lot of people think that we're going to see a blast off from here towards the end

of the year. November and December are traditionally hot months when you're in a bull market, which

most people think that that's what we're in. And this sideways consolidation may be the

preparation for that. I'm hoping this week that things start moving up. The weekend typically

isn't, sometimes the weekend can actually be kind of crazy, but typically the weekend

is pretty boring anyways. The volumes are much lower in the markets. Apparently people

actually don't trade 24 seven. It's kind of stunning. Anyways, hopefully this week things

will pick up. I hope everybody's doing well. Oh, I do have one more news item. I can't

believe I almost forgot this. We have a new website and I have a new address, email address.

So earlier this week I bought genwealthcrypto.com. Now that's not the best domain name in the

world, but do you know how difficult it is to find a name with crypto in it? Of course,

generational wealth with cryptocurrency, at least it sort of goes along with it. It was

about as short as I could get. So genwealthcrypto.com points to our new website and that website

is strictly about this podcast. If you go and look at it, it's not perfect. I did get

it in decent shape. There's probably some links. In fact, I know there are that don't

work at this point. My new email is mcintosh@genwealthcrypto.com. Twitter stays the

same mcintosh.fintech on Twitter. Follow me on Twitter if you'd like. I do post periodically.

I don't post every day. Sometimes I post a few things at a time. I don't know. I probably

post almost daily in terms of numbers, if that makes sense. So it just depends on what's

going on. A lot of times my schedule is kind of crazy and I just, that's just one of the

things that I don't do very much. I do find benefit on Twitter from following various

people, getting some information that way. You can certainly take a look at who I follow

and might give you an idea. But I've been telling y'all I was going to do that and I

did it and got it launched. Pretty happy with it. It will continue to improve over time

here. I will start publishing episode information. I would like to do transcripts. I don't know

that may take too much work. At least I, there's automated systems certainly to start with.

The problem with that is when they're automated, they never do a very good job of cleaning

it up. It's always got, you have to go in and work on it. At least I do. I feel bad

leaving it like that. We'll see. All right everyone, that's going to do it for this week.

Hope you found this helpful. Remember as you're building your wealth, you have to keep it

safe. It is yours. It is your responsibility. It's not anyone else's. If you've got more

than a few hundred to maybe a thousand or two dollars, US dollars in crypto, you really

ought to start thinking about a hardware wallet, keeping your money, your crypto offline and