What are the types of wallet I can have?

There are two types of wallets. One is called a “hot wallet” and this is any wallet that you hold online in a “live” way—be it on your laptop, phone or iPad.  The second type of wallet is a “cold wallet” which is a bit more like a flash drive.  This is a device that is held outside of your normal devices (some people, for example, wear theirs around their neck or put it into a safe at home) and it keeps your information safe and non-hackable.  It’s good to have a cold wallet if you have a lot of crypto—the term “crypto whale,” for example, refers to someone with a lot of bitcoin.  These users often have cold wallets to make sure their assets stay safe.  But if you don’t have a lot of assets, hot wallets are fine.  (For example, just using Coinbase on your phone.)

It’s hard to hack a hot wallet, but like we mentioned before, your seed phrase (Private Key) is everything here.  You must put that on paper somewhere or into an ultra-safe online storage system like OnePassword and NOT keep it on your computer just on your desktop or in a file somewhere.  Hackers can hack you easily for a seed phrase kept locally on your computer via any shared network, like, for example, a Starbucks shared wifi account.  Putting your Private Key seed phrase on paper somewhere is actually a form of having a “cold wallet”—sometimes also called a “paper wallet.”  It’s just smart.