Today’s post is about the best Desktop wallets available for storing your Bitcoins. Desktop wallets are wallets that store the private key for your Bitcoins on your hard drive. By nature, desktop wallets are more secure than mobile wallets (since they’re harder to steal).


Of course desktop wallets are still considered “hot wallets”, since they are connected to the Internet. This makes them inherently insecure. However, for small amounts of Bitcoin or altcoin they are a good solution.

For large amounts of Bitcoin ALWAYS use cold storage wallets like a paper wallet or a hardware wallet. Today I’m going to review 4 different desktop wallets that work on all 3 major operating systems – Mac OS, Linux and Windows.

Electrum – The All Around Winner Bitcoin Desktop Wallet

It took me a while to start using Electrum, but once I did, I never looked back. I’ll start with the downside – Electrum is ugly. The interface looks like a 90’s version of Windows. Also, if you’re completely new to Bitcoin I have the feeling you’ll get lost pretty quickly due to the unfriendly interface.
However, once you get over the interface issues, Electrum is one of the most robust, effective and secure desktop wallets out there. Also it’s open source, meaning many people have taken part in reviewing and composing the code. This reduces the chance of malicious code inside the software to practically zero.

In times when the Bitcoin network is “crowded” and transaction fees can skyrocket, Electrum is one of the few wallets that allows you to replace the fee you’ve set to an already broadcasted transaction. This feature is very handy when you can’t get your transaction to confirm.

Additional features include address tagging, fee adjustments, encrypting your wallet and signing / verifying messages (this is an advanced feature).

Bottom line, this is an excellent wallet. If you understand Bitcoin good enough to use it, go for it. Electrum is available for Mac, Windows and Linux.