When you deposit money at a bank, you let them worry about security. Bitcoins, however, are stored on your computer and that means you are fully responsible for securing them.
Welcome to a new episode of Crypto Tips. Today we're talking about Coinbase and what makes this website a really good choice for new users to cryptocurrency. I use Coinbase the very first time that I purchased it Coin and in my experience it was very easy to figure out the layout was very basic. I was able to easily connect my bank account with Coinbase and my purchase went very smoothly.
Coinbase now offers Ethereum on their platform which is also great because I think Bitcoin and Ethereum are both very good investments to get into. Even though Coinbase works both as an online exchange and as a wallet I suggest using an offline wallet to store any of your funds long-term. I choose to use BitAdress.org for producing my offline wallets and what I do is I disable my Wi-Fi or internet connection as I am producing my public and private keys. The private key is what's most important because that is what gives me access to withdrawing funds and that is obviously the same thing that the hacker would want access to so I disconnect my Wi-Fi and or my internet connection just to be sure that they have no connection to what I am seeing on my computer screen.
Also when I want to withdraw funds from this offline wallet even if I don't want to use all of the funds I take everything out of the wallet once I've used the private key just because you never know who has access to it and once it's been kind of put in the internet it's out there so just as an added security I take everything out and then anything I don't need I put into a different offline wallet. The reason I suggest using an offline wallet rather than the wallet provided by Coinbase is because no matter how much security they say that they have for their customer's funds the bottom line is that Coinbase is a third party involved with your money. Offline wallets like BitAdress.org don't tie any private information your name or anything to the funds it's just an address with a public key and then you keep your private key for your own usage. As a matter of fact we're seeing very recently how third parties involved with your funds can affect your privacy.
The IRS for example very recently has become has begun requesting information for millions of Coinbase users from the years 2013 until 2015. Although a judge hasn't yet granted the IRS access to this information the very fact that they're snooping around is just one more hint that you should use offline wallets or any other different option that eliminates a third party from having access to your private information because you never know if they'll decide to share it or there's legal problems it's just much easier to have your own private wallet and with your money and none of your private information is attached to it. But bottom line I think Coinbase is a great website for anyone new to purchasing Bitcoin and actually if you want to get a free time dollars before you buy your Bitcoin go ahead and use my promo code down below in the description. That's it for today's crypto tips if you like what you see here give us a like share this video with your friends and follow us to get your weekly fix of all things crypto