Last night I received a phone call from a friend and said in a crying voice: “When I was taking a bath tonight, the mobile phone with the wallet dropped into the water after a free fall. The phone is okay, but can the tokens in the wallet be recovered?”
Many users who have just come into contact with the blockchain like my friend always hear “How many tokens are in the wallet”, “How many tokens are transferred out of the wallet”, “Is my token gone if my phone breaks? “ Such words make them mistakenly believe that the tokens are stored in the wallet. There are similar concerns such as “Will the wallet project party take my tokens” and “Is it safe to put my tokens in the wallet”.
In this article, let ’s talk about “Where are the tokens in the wallet?”
First of all, it is necessary to correct a big misunderstanding: “Storing tokens in the wallet means transferring them to the wallet project party.”
Definitely not like this.
The blockchain is essentially a distributed ledger. The nodes distributed independently in each place have an identical ledger, and all transactions and circulations of tokens are recorded in these ledgers.
Just like a family of three people building a group chat, each person ’s expenditure or income needs to be posted to the group to record; each family member ’s expenditure and income are open to all members, and these records cannot be deleted or modified by anyone.
The main function of the wallet is to randomly generate private keys and wallet addresses, and access the blockchain network to receive and send digital assets. For example, the balance in your wallet is displayed by the wallet after reading the balance of your address on the blockchain.
Let’s take the example of the family group chatting and accounting again. If you want to know how much money you have left after integrating your recorded income and expenses this month, you need to read your records one by one. The wallet is a tool that can help you quickly load each of your records, calculate your balance and display it.
In other words, in the world of blockchain, wallet is a tool to help everyone manage assets and data on the chain. Our digital assets are stored on the chain, not in the wallet.
Any decentralized wallet cannot steal your assets.
As long as the wallet’s private key is in your hands, you have the sole control over the assets in the wallet, which means that the tokens placed in the wallet are under your own control.
Even if the mobile phone where the wallet is installed cannot be used, just download the wallet in the new phone and import it with the private key, and your tokens will appear in the wallet. Because as long as the transactions of the tokens and the blockchain ledger are recorded, there will be no problems, and your tokens will not disappear.
Then someone will ask, if the blockchain that records my transactions fails and the ledger is lost or damaged, will my tokens disappear?
In fact, there will be no problem, because the blockchain is a distributed ledger. Even if some nodes fail, there will be other normal nodes that retain the complete blockchain ledger.
Just like the family bookkeeping group chat just mentioned, the group chat record on your dad ’s phone was damaged for some reason, but your mom ’s group chat record is still there and is exactly the same as your dad ’s.
Although the tokens stored on the blockchain are not easy to lose, this does not mean that you can be completely at ease. You must carefully back up the private key and json file (the Neo wallet has json files).
If the private key is not properly backed up, you will lose the control of the assets in the wallet, and no one can help you retrieve your assets, including the wallet project party.
This can also be regarded as a small drawback of the decentralized wallet. While giving users absolute control over encrypted assets, they also need to bear the risk of losing or leaking private keys and losing assets.
