Setting up & Testing a Bitcoin Hardware Wallet Properly
I’ve been asked a few times by friends how to setup a hardware wallet for crypto “properly”. There are many different ways to do this, but this is the best way I’ve found so far. So what’s the aim of doing this?
For one to be confident if a hardware wallet is lost or stolen, that the coins are recoverable!
Stepping back a bit, and to give some background - why would one want a hardware wallet in the first place? Well good question.
If you have enough coins, then you might want to consider it as a type of Cold storage, for more security, over just keeping it on your computer (aka Hot storage). The main reason for this over other methods of cold-storage is that it gives you a lot of the security of an offline wallet (harder to hack compared to one on your computer), but is way more practical to use: i.e. you can use it to send transactions without having to import your whole offline/paper wallet somewhere, or run a totally air-gapped rig and move the sig over to an internet connected one.
How secure are hardware wallets? Pretty secure apparently — here is great quote from the bitcoin.it hardware wallet page:
To date there have been no verifiable incidents of…
