12° Chapter: What Is the Purpose of a Wallet to Make Purchases in Crypto Art?

 

The wallet is the fundamental tool for trading cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum on which crypto art is based. These, for the most part, have their own virtual wallet and some third-party ones that are reputed to be secure. Each wallet has its own address, which can be compared to the IBAN, which is used to receive money. The initial letter describes what cryptocurrency you are storing (for example, B stands for Bitcoin).

The operation of the wallet is very simple: you open it and decide whether to send or receive money. If you want to receive, then you have to request a receiving address, which represents the public key of your wallet. There is also a private key, which is strictly personal and must not be spread in any way. If you want to make a payment, you have to know the recipient's receiving address and, depending on the fee you choose, you have to pay a fee and wait for the confirmation of the payment. Every transaction, once it is made, is irreversible.

Each wallet guarantees absolute anonymity of the user. To create a virtual wallet, in fact, you'll simply have to enter an email address and no sensitive data. Then it will be possible to personalize it with security methods, such as a password to open the software or a message with a different code for each transaction that will be made. It will be possible to manage the wallet, then, through your smartphone or PC on sites that provide the service in question, but there also exists software that allow you to manage it even without being connected to a portal.

On the net we can find numerous examples of wallets. We must, therefore, be careful to decide which ones we want to invest our money in. From this point of view, they need to satisfy at least 4 important characteristics:

• Privacy and Security: no one must view or manage your wallet, but the control must be specifically of the user. In addition, each transaction must be anonymous and untraceable. An external proxy is usually used to prevent hackers from viewing transactions.
• Direct confirmation: transactions must be sent directly within the cryptocurrency network, without going through intermediaries. This requires more time and space, but obviously has more secure processing.
• Open source: the transparency of the code allows each programmer to verify that it does not hide any secret.
• Different levels of authentication: to access the wallet, multiple verifications must be required, hence different passwords.

There are various services for the creation of a personal wallet. The most used are those that are managed directly through the PC. The software must be installed on your hard disk and the wallet will be protected with several passwords. It is suggested to hide it very well inside the folders, to avoid it being seen by prying eyes and above all to create some backup copies of the files, since, if they were lost, the wallet would be deleted, thus making it inaccessible and leading to the loss of the money that was inside.