Wallets · 15 / 86
Hot wallets
A hot wallet lives on a phone or a browser, online, ready to sign. That readiness is why people use it, and why it gets drained.
The machine
The browser wallet sits next to tabs, extensions, and ads. A bad extension can ask you to sign. A fake pop-up can look like the wallet.
A split that helps
Keep spending money in the hot wallet. Keep savings in a wallet you do not browse with. When the hot wallet is lost, the loss has a ceiling you chose.
A mobile wallet backup that emails the seed to you has already failed.
Check yourself
Is a browser extension a cold wallet?
No. It is online, on the machine you use for the web.
After this you can treat a browser wallet as spending money, not as the vault.
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