Since I made my first (and only… YET!) crypto purchase to date it has been sitting over at Coinbase for the last 2 and a half years. At the time of purchasing, I had no idea you could keep your own keys without having to have an online wallet. With the impending changes to Bitcoin, the Steemit cryptocurrency threads have been talking about the subject of wallets (paper, hardware, hot, cold, etc!) quite a lot and it really lit a fire under my ass to research the different types of wallets and what it all means for my Bitcoin.

After doing a TON of reading on Steemit and consulting with my buddy @rhyt about it, I decided the best solution for now was to get a paper wallet. A paper wallet is just a print out from your computer that has the 2 magical keys (your Bitcoin Address and you Private Key) printed on it that represent your paper wallet and how you send/receive Bitcoin to it. Bitaddress.org seemed the easiest way to generate a paper wallet so I checked out there options and got to work. In just a minute I was able to print my first paper wallet!

Now comes the hard part. I opened up Coinbase and went to the Send tab and then just sat and stared at the screen for a while… like a long while… This was my first official transfer of my precious Bitcoin and I certainly didn't want to screw it up. If you send it to the wrong address then you are just out of luck it seems (correct me if I am wrong!).

While right now it is looking like BIP91 is signaling a lock in, but this was still a great motivator to learn what I truly needed to learn about truly owning your own coin and not leaving it on an exchange or online wallet like Coinbase. Now I own my own keys for my Bitcoin and it feels pretty good, like I am in control of my finances in a new way.

Make sure to follow me over on Steemit – @cryptostache