Hey stackers, i may have missed the boat a lil but am starting to look into crypto currencies and most secure way of keeping them and heard that hardware wallets are the safest. Dose any one here use one and what is you review of them are they worth getting. Cheers Darren...
not much point, what happens if you lose it or the hardware fails? just use a paper wallet for free or a good online service that you can download your keys e.g. blockchain.info if you really want one then trezor are good but expensive.
If you lose your hardware wallet you can always recover your funds by using your recovery phrase. The only disadvantage I can see with the hardware wallet is that you need a computer and Google app to run it. Other than that it can be done on any computer without lose of security as you always need the hardware and a code to access any funds. I have a Ledger Nano S. A paper wallet is good if you can safely generate your seed offline. The problems I see with the paper wallet are you can't spend part of the wallet and keep some in it, you have to transfer all the funds in one shot. And once it's used a paper wallet is compromised and shouldn't be used again. If using a paper wallet I would have a number of wallets each with small amounts that I could transfer to my smartphone for spending, or maybe hand them out to friends like gift vouchers. A bit of advice: don't leave funds on an exchange and don't leave large amounts on your smartphone, as these are all exposed to hackers.
That's the entire point of a hardware wallet. Because the key is generated internally in the hardware device, there is no way it could have been compromised unlike your PC (or even more trivially & frequently) your phone. Do NOT use your phone to generate keys or start a wallet, it is the most unsafe platform possible. Your PC next safest, then hardware wallets that are 100% safe. Trezor is good and works well, but Ledger are fine too.
No problem, just use the recovery seed you have written down: https://doc.satoshilabs.com/trezor-faq/threats.html
Cheers for the replys. I refuse to keep any info on my fone, i wont even use fb through my fone and will never do any sort of banking...
sounds like a paper wallet to me sure i understand keys are generated inside the hardware, however i am pretty certain i can use a clean machine to generate keys. trezor has a 2 button spend feature which is nice.
Yes, you can use a "clean" machine, but how do you guarantee a complex modern O/S machine is really "clean"? That's the point of hardware wallets, no need to take a risk it's not clean. No need to risk that someone or some key logger is snooping on you etc.
a clean virtual machine is relatively easy to setup and use for security. if you arent sure your machine is clean then how do you do online banking etc?
When making paper wallets I boot to Linux Mint using a USB stick. Then while remaining off the internet I use one of those presaved html sites (saved to a separate USB stick) that randomly generate a seed as you move the mouse around. When I have my new seed I print it to a PDF file, or save it as a JPG, and then save it to the separate USB stick. A more secure way would be to print it directly to a USB connected printer. You also need to be aware that every networked printer is also exposed to hackers and pages printed could be stored in the printers memory making it easy for hackers to access. However, I've found that using a hardware wallet saves me all that messing around and I believe it's more secure.
only a matter of time before a man in the middle attack between your computer and your hardware wallet. providing you have good security practice then no reason other wallets can be just as secure as hardware alternatives.
I use a Ledger HW.1 as a poor man's hardware wallet. It's a bit fiddly to use with the security key card for second factor authentication, but it works. I have preordered the new Ledger Blue, which should be simpler. I also use paper wallets for long term storage buy and forget, mainly with altcoins that I can't yet be bothered installing a wallet for. I gifted my daughter a bitcoin on her birth in April sent to a paper wallet. (She has done alright for herself so far with a 4118 % gain and she's not yet 6 months old.) I also use phone wallet with amounts of coin I am okay with carrying around in my pocket. I have an EFTPOS card linked to a bitcoin account for spending, keeping only amounts I'm prepared to lose if it gets goxxed. It is a case of horses for courses and only you can decide what storage method best fits your needs and comfort level of security and ease of use. My biggest fear is not theft, but fire or my death, leaving my loved ones unable to access my funds. I am yet to implement an effective dead man's switch.
the key sequence is irrelevant if you cannot confirm if the trezor is authentic, what is to stop it being tampered with? a relevant attack vector if there is enough incentive.
What is to stop your paper wallet being tampered with? You keep buggers away from it I imagine. The same way you keep your gold and silver being tampered with. Sure, enough incentive and you can come up with all sorts of Hollywood style attacks.
i can recognise pretty easily if a paper wallet had been tampered with, not so a complex bit of electronics. i can also validate the paper was trustworthy when i loaded it.
Buy an authentic one. In any case you can reflash the firmware and checksum it against sotoshi labs private key, that's another point of these things. If you want to super paranoid, the source code and hardware are all open source, check it all yourself.
Trezor is very secure. Even if you managed to break the pin (unlikely) and tried to steal the seeds inside they've already upgraded for that. It's practically impossible to break the code, plus you only have to add a paraphrase to your seeds and then it becomes another impossibility. In fact you can have different tranches, as many split wallets as you want, with a different paraphrase for each one, which means if you were forced to divulge your 'wallet code' there is no way of knowing how many other tranches it contains... Try to beat that !
