 Welcome to the Daily Decrypt, where currency competition will set you free. I am your host, Amanda B. Johnson, and today's episode is brought to you by The Miracle. In any cryptocurrency, control of funds is determined by one thing and one thing alone, the private key. He who knows the private key for the funds in any given address controls those funds, period. And it is your wallet which stores this private key, whether your wallet be on your phone, your desktop, your laptop, or even on someone else's computer if you use, say, a web wallet to host your private key for you. So as the owner of any amount of cryptocurrency, it behooves one to have a backup of this private key, in case said phone, laptop, desktop, or other person's computer is lost or damaged or destroyed or stolen. So I'm going to show you two things. First is how to make a backup and second is how to store it. And as a side note, backups come in three primary forms. A seed phrase, which is a nine to 24 word passphrase of regular words. Or a wallet file backup, which is something like a dot dat or a dot json or a dot bin. Or the private key itself, which will be a long alphanumeric string. And the kind of backup your wallet generates just depends on the wallet that you're using. First, watch me make a backup. Now here is a mobile dash wallet. And this particular wallet is kind enough to tell me, hey, I haven't made a backup yet. But take note that there are many different kinds of wallets for many different kinds of cryptos. And they won't all tell you, hey, you haven't made a backup yet. Sometimes you have to go looking. So comb all around the wallet until you see, hey, there's the point that lets me make a backup. And if it doesn't give you that option, you probably don't want to be using that kind of wallet anyway. So that being said, my mobile dash wallet asks me to choose a password to encrypt my backup. Now this is to ensure that were anyone to ever come across my backup, they wouldn't be able to gain control of my funds unless they knew the password that it had been encrypted with. Okay, cool. And so once I proceed, bam, my backup has been generated. And it asks me whether I'd like to email it to myself, Bluetooth it to myself, telegram it to myself. Any of these options is fine, be it a seed or a wallet file or the private key itself. Any of these is fine. We just need to decide how we want to store it. You could store your backup in any number of ways. You could store it on a flash drive, preferably encrypted. That's easy to take around. You could store it on a large hard drive, again, preferably encrypted. You could even store a backup on a piece of paper, really, like you could write down the seed. I don't know if you could copy the wallet file to paper. Maybe you could. Maybe you could be pretty long, but sure, why not? And you could certainly copy down the private key itself to paper. So any of these processes is acceptable for making your backup with the one caveat in mind that the point of making a backup is that you don't want it stored in the same place as the original. So if you keep your phone or your laptop, say like in your laptop case, you don't want your backup also in your laptop case, because then if the original gets stolen, well, the backup just got stolen with it as well. So geographic diversity is key in storing your backups, and that's really all there is to it. Most good wallets only require one backup or one every once in a great while. Wallets are getting better about this. It's getting easier to make the backups. It's getting easier to be reminded. And just remember that you are an early adopter. Yes, you are an early adopter of the future. And so little pain in the ass steps like backing up your damn wallet really can pay off in the long run. So enjoy that. Make a backup. Today's episode is brought to you by the Merkle, which is a cryptocurrency and blockchain news hub where you will find breaking fintech stories, product tutorials similar to what I did today, technical analyses for top coins, and even the occasional and important scam warning. You can get it all delivered to your email inbox when you sign up for the newsletter at themerkle.com. And put it in your calendar, folks. Amanda B. Johnson's AMA Ask Me Anything is this Saturday, March 26th, all day long at reddit.com. Slash r slash the daily decrypt. Let me give you a little teaser of something that you will learn there that day. Amanda traded three blank for three bitcoins in December 2013. See you then. The dear old market gave us the solution of hardware wallets. Don't ask me how they work. It seems a little bit magic, but I know that they do work and I know that because I own one. And at a user request, I'm now going to show you how to use it.