PIVX Best Practices

The below section is a non extensive list of best practices that will help you secure your PIVs and help you avoid the most common pitfalls you could get into.

WARNING - Scammers are everywhere! Please be extra-cautious when asking for support and never solicit or accept help via private messages on any of our PIVX communication channels or social media. Please report any user asking for your wallet.dat, private key, or any other personal information to the #security channel in the PIVX Discord server.

Best Practices:

  1. Always encrypt your wallet file with a 16+ character passphrase. This will protect your PIVs in case someone accesses your wallet.dat file.
  2. Always back up your wallet.dat file on at least two separate medias (e.g. USB keys).
  3. Never ever delete or overwrite a wallet.dat file or your backups folder. Instead, rename the existing file and add it to your backups.
  4. Do not forget your encrypted wallet's passphrase. If you do, your funds are lost. If you need to record the passphrase somewhere, make sure you use an offline, secure method that you will not lose access to and that nobody else can access.
  5. Do not run the same wallet in multiple locations at the same time. This can corrupt your wallet files.
  6. Do not back up your wallet.dat file to a cloud provider or shared storage without a second layer of encryption like 7zip or veracrypt container.
  7. When designing your backup scheme, assess the risks you could be facing and adapt your level of protection to these risks. These risks could include loss of physical media, hardware failures, loss of access to an online account or server, natural disaster in your house (flood, fire, etc.), or unauthorized access to your systems.
  8. NEVER send your wallet.dat file to anyone for any reason. At best this would violate your privacy and at worst would put your coins at risk. There is no reason for any support staff to request your wallet file.
  9. NEVER share the information obtained from the dumpprivkey or masternodeprivkey commands with anyone. This would give them access to your PIVX.

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