You can buy, sell, earn and store cryptocurrency in different ways – in particular, there are a lot of online services for this. But today we’ll talk about Bitcoin applications - you can download them to your computer or phone to comfortably manage your assets. Mobile versions of wallets and exchanges allow you to send transactions or trade literally on the go, and desktop applications (terminals) provide increased security compared to the browser. The editors of Profinvestment.com reviewed the best Bitcoin applications that are presented in the industry today.
FAQ
What is meant by Bitcoin applications?
Any mobile applications that allow you to interact with the Bitcoin cryptocurrency - buy, sell, earn, etc.
What apps allow you to buy Bitcoin?
These are mainly crypto exchanges and exchangers - for example, Binance, Bybit, EXMO, Baksman, p2p exchanges (such as Cryptolocator).
What do wallet apps do?
Allows you to send and receive transactions. In terms of storage of assets, they can be custodial or non-custodial. The second option is preferable, as it allows you to store the keys to access the funds yourself.
Are there Bitcoin analytics apps?
Yes, these useful services will help you track the exchange rates of the currencies of interest and price dynamics, as well as capitalization and other indicators.
What are trading bot apps used for?
By connecting to exchanges, they automatically trade cryptocurrency according to specified settings.
What do training programs provide?
Contain educational courses or news content that will help you learn to understand the market.
What apps can you use to make money?
Services for managing mining or cloud mining, faucets, airdrops (distribution of free coins), Bitcoin games.
What the public and private keys of a Bitcoin wallet look like
The Bitcoin private key is encoded in the following formats : Base64, MINI, Hex, WIF, compressed WIF. They are all interconnected and transform one into another:
- WIF format (51 characters, "5" at the beginning): 5JPeWYZx922hXi49Lg2RJPwLfqcmDGS9YegMNgANvx8cJa6kNK8.
- Most cryptocurrency wallets use the WIF-compressed format (52 characters, starting with “L” or “K”) to store private keys: KykxZQLSNPYVtYCsoqFGFnEqpRar997zihJgvfrPo8LapFrAtaea.
- Hex format (64 characters): 4BBFF74CA25A2A00409DCB24EC0418E9A41F9B3B56216A183E0E9731F4589DC6.
- Base64 format (44 characters): S7/3TKJaKgBAncsk7AQY6aQfmztWIWoYPg6XMfRYncY=.
The picture shows one Bitcoin private key in different formats:
Public address (key)
Appearance of a public Bitcoin key in various formats:
- The most used in wallets is the short address. It looks like 1BSUkuwtdM7gkdy6W4Q954gNKWBgy4A19Q and always starts with one or three (segwit address).
Public keys are visible to everyone and are used as an address for sending or receiving bitcoins. You can generate an unlimited number of public keys in one wallet. Each will have its own private key.
In simple words, any cryptocurrency wallet is a private key from which a public key is generated.
Willpower and zombie coins
For the purposes of this article, zombie bitcoins are defined as all bitcoins associated with an address that has not had any coin sending transactions for 18 months. Why exactly 18 months? Because today one coin costs about $600, and back in December 2013 it cost more than $1000. Anyone who has owned Bitcoin for more than 18 months would have purchased it at a maximum price of around $30, which was quite expensive at that time. It is much more likely that most of them were purchased for $10, and on average generally for less than $1 per coin. Moreover, the owner of such bitcoins would have to have incredible willpower not to be tempted and sell them in November-December with a profit of 4000% or more. When we look at the history of these zombie coins, it turns out that many people were willing to withdraw their virtual money into cash, so we can say that these zombie bitcoins have truly risen from the dead. As the price of Bitcoin rises, the supply of zombie coins decreases over time. Every time there is a rise in prices, you can see that this process “awakens” even more zombies who re-enter the active economy.
Over time, this trend stops and fewer and fewer Bitcoins come back from the dead and those that remain “stuck” and unchanged. During this time, all early Bitcoin blocks in circulation remain unchanged, regardless of what happens to the price. It is critical to understand that for the purposes of this analysis, Bitcoins are considered "live" based on any spending transaction, no matter how small. This means that if a person owns a thousand bitcoins that cost him $1, and he sells only one of those bitcoins, for example to buy a coat on Overstock.com or maybe move it to another wallet, then this action will reveal the entire thousand , associated specifically with this Bitcoin address. For Bitcoins to be considered zombie coins, this means that they are 100% completely intact in any form for 18 months.
While there may be a lot of people who "got Bitcoin early" over a year or a year and a half ago when the price was a fraction of what it is today, and those people are still waiting for more returns, one would expect many of them to want to cash out a little for fun. Understand that any "spend" transaction shows that the person is actively in control of that private key. We don't care if they're actually still waiting for potential profits. We are trying to identify bitcoins that are irretrievably lost, and this can be done by determining whether anyone has access to the private key needed to move or spend those coins.
So, what better reason could there be to not touch your bitcoins for more than 18 months and refuse to make more than 4000% profit? Over the past year and a half, we have learned a lot about the security of Bitcoin wallets. Imagine that you are sitting on a pile of bitcoins that you bought for one penny apiece, and today they are worth a million dollars. Now, let's say that you are very bullish on Bitcoin and you don't need a million dollars today, but you think the coins will be worth ten or a hundred million within the next few years. However, you will probably be concerned about the safety of your virtual money. It would be like holding one winning lottery ticket. The person will likely be quite careful with it. The owner of that lottery ticket will keep it safe and will likely double or triple check that the numbers are correct. The same applies to the Bitcoin treasure. Wouldn't you want to move them to a more secure wallet or just do a little sending test to make sure the private key is working and that the backup is intact?
If you have absolute confidence in your year-and-a-half-old Bitcoin wallet and don't feel the need to check your Bitcoins or transfer them to a safer place, then you are a very brave person, much braver than the statistical majority.
Thanks to advances in Bitcoin security and simple human psychology, it is difficult to imagine that a huge percentage of Bitcoin zombies are under active control. There is, of course, a possibility that there are such individuals, but their number is probably approaching a statistically insignificant point. This could burn up all the charts, where over time the rate at which Bitcoin zombies come back to life steadily decreases.
In conclusion, while there is no way to know with absolute certainty the status of zombie coins, by looking at trends over time it is probably safe to assume that the vast majority of 30% of the total amount of Bitcoin mined to date are irretrievably lost , with most of them being discarded because they were worthless at the time or were lost due to the destruction of storage media.
Even if we can't be 100% sure of the death of Bitcoin zombies, we can still track these Bitcoins, which over time will increase our level of confidence that they will return to the active economy and disrupt it. Moreover, if we had even more confidence, we could build some of our assumptions about the entire Bitcoinomics in terms of things like market capitalization and relative velocity.
Once you eliminate the 30% Bitcoin zombies, what remains shows a healthy distribution in the coin economy, showing a balance between Bitcoins used as a long-term store of value and those actively traded on a regular basis.
Losing your hardware wallet
Losing a hardware wallet (physical storage, visually similar to a flash drive) is not as scary as it seems; to recover, follow the following algorithm:
- buy a new device;
- download the wallet and refuse to create a new storage by selecting the recovery function;
- enter the seed phrase and wait for the new configuration to load.
As a result, the restoration will take you only about two hundred dollars (the price of a new physical wallet) and several tens of minutes of personal time for its initial setup.
The threat posed by forks
Separately, crypto enthusiasts highlight the problem of Bitcoin forks. These are coins that are issued according to the same technical principles as BTC, but with some modifications. The reason is modern economic and technical factors that force the development of even the newest technologies.
Experts predict a scenario that a huge number of forks will be able to completely overshadow the significance of the outdated Bitcoin. The likelihood of the situation today is low, and the consequences have not been studied, but we cannot forget about the trend.
Treasure of the Sleeping Dragon
Considering that Satoshi is the creator of the entire system, one very significant question logically arises - does he control the private keys to Bitcoin addresses that are necessary for transactions with these coins? The answer, frankly, is that we have no way of knowing. We all know that to date he has not spent it or even moved it to a new wallet. He didn't do anything to them. In fact, if Satoshi had made even one transaction from any of these blocks, it would have been an immediate alarm bell for the entire Bitcoin community.
From everything we know about Satoshi, he was quite meticulous about his personal security, and he certainly understood Bitcoin's long-term potential. He wrote about this possibility widely and it was ingrained at the heart of the design of this network. In fact, as mysterious as Satoshi is, we actually know a lot about him because he publicly interacted with the community for two years. Here is a phenomenal book that contains the complete collection of Satoshi's "writings" on Bitcoin that have ever appeared on the Internet. We can get a lot of interesting looks here. Additionally, we can also consider the very real possibility that Satoshi Nakamoto is very likely Nick Szabo, and we can find a lot of his writings here.
Here are some other options:
— Satoshi lost or threw away private keys for his own reasons and will never share this information with the community;
- Satoshi controls the private keys, but, in principle, has decided that he will not ever use them;
— Satoshi is dead and the keys are lost forever with him;
— Satoshi controls the private keys and has a plan to somehow use them sometime in the future. It's interesting to speculate about what this plan might be:
- It can probably be assumed that his plan will not include using these untold riches (he is already so rich that it is even difficult to imagine);
“He probably has no intention of using these hidden riches to destroy what he has built;
“He may have some kind of plan to distribute Bitcoin to achieve some personal political goals and at the same time, without destroying the value of the network.
The point is that we are unlikely to know about Nakamoto's plans, and the fact that we don't know creates a degree of uncertainty that makes us uncomfortable. Ideally, Satoshi would make some kind of public statement about his intentions, but so far this seems unlikely. All we can do now is wait and hope that he doesn't intend to do anything to intentionally harm the monster he created.
So, if Satoshi only controls 10% of the zombie bitcoins in circulation, what about the 20%, what can we learn about them? In fact, by analyzing the movement of zombie coins over time, we can learn quite a bit.
How to create private Bitcoin keys
When you create any Bitcoin wallet, a private key is created. Depending on the type of wallets, you may or may not have control over them. The latter case applies more to online services where you can go through a simple registration and get a Bitcoin address, but private keys are not available. The owners of these online wallets have control over them. Therefore, we recommend choosing crypto wallets with the ability to download private keys or save seeds.
Wallets for cryptocurrencies are:
- Local. Installed on desktop or mobile devices. These include Jaxx, Electrum, Coinomi, Exodus and others. They are divided into “thin” and “thick”, depending on the method of accessing the blockchain network.
- Online wallets. To create them, you usually need to specify an email and password. Such services may or may not provide the ability to view private keys. Popular sites for storing crypto coins: blockchain.com.
- Cryptocurrency exchanges. After creating an account, wallets for cryptocurrencies are available, which are listed on the site. Private keys are not provided. You can make a deposit to the provided address, trade cryptocurrency and make a withdrawal. Popular trading platforms: LocalBitcoins (LocalBitcoins), EXMO, Binance, Huobi, BitMEX and others.
- Hardware wallets. The safest option to keep your crypto assets safe. The owner has full control over all private keys, and their theft is impossible. They produce hardware devices Ledger, Trezor and others.
- Paper. This could simply be a private key written down on paper or services that generate it and provide the ability to print and save it. The method refers to the “cold” storage of cryptocurrencies.
The beginning of the blockchain
Let's take, as an example, the very first Bitcoin transaction ever conducted in history, which corresponds to the first ever mined Bitcoin block of the notorious Satoshi Nakamoto. Here is a link to this transaction. This very first transaction, which was the result of a newly mined Bitcoin block (known as “coinbase”), took place at the address with the following public key: 1A1zP1eP5QGefi2DMPTfTL5SLmv7DivfNa.
If you follow this link, you will see that there are 908 Bitcoin transactions associated with this address! However, they are all the result of donations from random people on the Internet. However, there was not a single “spending” transaction from this address.
Now let's look at the second transaction in Bitcoin history. Six days later, Satoshi mined another Bitcoin block and received another reward of 50 Bitcoins. By the way, at that time they did not cost anything, but today it is about $30,000. Here is the link. These 50 bitcoins have already been sent to another public key address: 12c6DSiU4Rq3P4ZxziKxzrL5LmMBrzjrJX.
If you follow this link, you will see that the address received only 13 transactions, as people were a little less enthusiastic about the second block than the first.
The third Bitcoin block corresponds to this transaction and this public key. This block was mined on January 9, 2009 and then, much later, on August 25, 2013, some generous soul decided to donate 0.1 Bitcoin to Satoshi, or about $60 at today's exchange rate.
Finally, in block number four (link) we find that he never offered to donate to Satoshi at this address. And so it continued with blocks No. 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, and so on. Every ten minutes over the next couple of years, Bitcoin blocks were mined and sent to a new address and remained there, i.e. no one has used them yet. The vast majority of all these bitcoins were mined by Satoshi Nakamoto himself.
However, others were obtained by people who downloaded and experimented with the software. Many curious techies probably installed the mining software when it could still work with the CPU and just let it run for a while to see how it went at all. They then deleted the software and/or long ago lost the hard drive or computer that contained the mined bitcoins.
It's important to remember that during the first two years, Bitcoin was almost worthless. Here is a chart of the market price of Bitcoin throughout its history. As you can see, it was only by January 2011 that Bitcoin began to cost 1 US dollar.
So the question arises, what happened to all these “nobody’s” bitcoins? Where are they? How many are there? Do they still exist or are they lost forever? What about Bitcoin zombies? Will they rise from the dead to destroy the Bitcoin economy and market, or will they be lost to the system and users forever? Unfortunately, only some of these questions can be answered, such as how many Bitcoins can be considered “zombie” coins. You can also make some reasonable and interesting assumptions.
The fact remains that approximately 30% of all Bitcoins in existence are zombie coins, untouched for over a year and a half and likely lost forever. If you remove 30% of all Bitcoins as having a chance of ever affecting the market, it changes many of the popular assessments of the Bitcoin market today. Likewise, if these Bitcoins ever came back from the dead, they would wreak havoc on Bitcoin and lead to a huge number of problems.
We want to start this analysis by acknowledging that there is no way to know with 100% certainty whether these Bitcoin zombies will actually be dead or not, especially since we assume that more of them most certainly belong directly to the mysterious Satoshi himself Nakamoto is the person (or group of people) who created the Bitcoin software and mined the majority of Bitcoins within the first two years. This can be shown in more detail using technical analysis, which convincingly proves that Satoshi personally owns bitcoins in the amount of about one million coins, which were not spent on anything.
How to securely store private keys
When using online wallets, you should understand that the keys are stored on the servers of the developer company. The user personally owns the private key only when using desktop, hardware or paper wallets.
Code storage options:
- On paper.
- On a flash drive in the form of a screenshot or photo, pdf file.
- On a hard drive, including a removable one.
- On a physical coin, a metal plate (a kind of analogue of a hardware “cold” wallet in the form of a cryptocurrency coin).
- In mind.
None of the listed methods provides a 100% guarantee of key safety; in each case there is a possibility of physical damage, hacking or theft. So everyone makes a choice based on their own considerations.
There are now many attackers on the Internet who dream of stealing a Bitcoin private key. They can tempt you with free tokens, offer to receive new coins, and in return they ask you to upload a private key to the network or a program they created. Under no circumstances should this be done.
