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What is the difference between a 'hot' and 'cold' wallet

Bitcoin Stack Exchange

Bitcoin News / Bitcoin Stack Exchange 180 Views

My answer will never be better that the provided before but I would add that the term wallet has been very unfortunate because a wallet, cold or hot, is not actually containing any coins like traditional wallets made of fur and cloth do. The purpose of those widely called wallets, if we insist to name them this way, is to keep ´securely guarded´ the private keys associated with the infinite set of public keys that can be generated from the seed phrase obtained when that wallet was first generated (Obviously after BIP 39 was widely understood, implemented and used).

A hot wallet will be less secure because the hardware that contains the seed phrase and individual private keys, is connected to the internet and some bug or any malicious observer could grant himself access and steal those credentials that would allow him to sign valid transactions and thus empty your UTXOs.

A cold wallet, instead, never goes online, and the signing of the preformatted transaction happens offline, so the private keys will never be online and will be used offline to sign the transaction properly.

As a caveat, if the cold wallet is not well configured and does not generate randomness properly and there is address reuse, that cold wallet is deemed useless as well.


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