Wallets · 15 / 86 · 2 min
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.
A hot wallet is for money you can afford to have online. It is not a vault.
A worked case
A browser wallet holds both spending money and savings. A drainer page is opened from a search ad. Both balances go. The convenience was the same feature as the loss.
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.
July 2020: the blue checks asked for bitcoin
A hot wallet lives on a phone or in a browser, online, ready to sign. That is why people use one for small amounts, and why a single bad page can empty it. The most public version of the ask was not a clever contract. On 15 July 2020 attackers took over the Twitter accounts of public figures, including Barack Obama, Elon Musk, and Apple, and posted a bitcoin address with a promise to send back double. People sent coins. The platform later said about 130 accounts were hit, and the FBI investigated. The coins went to an ordinary address. The costume was a verified badge.
Browser wallets made the smaller version routine. A page asks you to connect, then to approve a token, and the approval sits there after you have closed the tab. The wallet was ready, which was the feature. Savings do not belong in a tool whose job is to be ready.
The Twitter theft is a record of urgency plus a famous face. The same shape still arrives by text, ad, and direct message. The address at the end is the only part that matters, and by then you should already have stopped.
Read it yourself
These links are the record. They are not a recommendation, and they are not instructions. A news story or a court paper can still be wrong about a detail. The check does not change because a famous name is in the story.
Apply the check
Open a question. The line is about this topic. It is not a verdict that anything is safe.
The page that asked you to sign.
The site, once you have connected and approved.
That signature, or malware on the phone.
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.