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Ledger BTC wallet is claimed to be one of the world’s safest and most user-friendly “hardware” wallets. And there is even better news – you can order it already.

- Read full article HERE (http://bitcoincasino.info/bitcoin-casino-news/ledger-introduces-hardware-btc-wallet/)

Hmm, is this just a glorified USB with password protection? The link doesn't give much at all.

Wow, it's a good product
But, which one is better ? This one / trazor ?

Anyway i think this is not too expensive

The Ledger Wallet Nano connects to your computer through the USB port, but is not a flash memory. It contains a secure element (smartcard), protecting the seed of your Bitcoin wallet.

You can see the wallet in action here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFvHq8zEgd8

A full review by Coindesk here:
http://www.coindesk.com/review-ledger-wallet-nano-provides-premium-security-budget/

Trezor is better any day. But that is only if u r fascinated about hardware wallet. I think for security, there is no replacement of a paper wallet.

Smartcard hardware wallets offers the same level of security than paper wallet, and even more.
A smartcard is garanteed 30+ years, it resists water damage, and it is PIN protected.

If you absolutely don't need to use your bitcoins, then yes, paper wallets could be an option.
But if you need to do payments and want to always have with you your Bitcoin "stash", then hardware wallet it is.

IMO, you should treat hardware wallets like a petty cash box, good for day to day spending amounts. What you don't want to do is commit large amounts of coins to them, stick them in a safe and forget about them.

Some of the perils of using a hardware wallet as long term cold storage may be:

Battery Malfunction; high likelihood of any battery going dead beyond recovery, if internal.
Battery Malfunction; could leak or corrode, causing damage mere battery replacement will not fix.
Software Rot; "bit rot", while cosmic rays may cause unnoticeable and recoverable errors in running systems, errors may accumulate, uncorrected over a period of months and lead to unrecoverable data loss.
Obsolescence; changes to core or seemingly minor changes to protocol, or even the odd fork may affect how the wallet works, there will probably be workarounds, but possible need for technical expertise and experimentation to use or recover.
Solder Metallurgy; Since the advent of lead free solder, we have been inflicted with many piss-poor substitutes, they can have alloys come out of solution over time, form whiskers and crystals, go brittle, oxidise, add all manner of bizarre failure modes. Only some of these failure modes are related to thermal cycling, some are age dependant.
Component Chemical stability; Capacitors in particular have been plagued by failures from this.  

If you like to gamble, gamble a little less by powering it up every 2 weeks. This should allow error correction to clean up the odd instance of bit rot before it accumulates, it keeps a battery in more viable condition, if anything is beginning to fail, it may be noticed in flaky behaviour, in which case recovery operations can proceed immediately. If it has gone dead in 2 weeks, then other recovery options are more likely to succeed, i.e. battery or capacitor secondary corrosion will be minimal and will clean up, solder failures have higher likelihood of responding to homebrew reflow techniques etc etc. whereas left for months unnoticed, damage may accumulate to a point that is not recoverable.

I will stick to my web wallet,i think the security is pretty decent

FYI, none of the points your made are valid for a smartcard.
A Ledger Wallet is as resilient as a SIM card, your credit card or the chip inside your passport.

little bit old news because you can buy this since weeks  :P

list of hardware-wallets:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=899253.0

30+ year life span? No, absolutely not. If you load it once and never plug it in again, maybe...  But realistically, if it's made of plastic and simple gold plating, it will never last 30 years in the wild.

where did you read that its gold plated? are they all made of it?

The 30 years thing is the data retention time coming directly from the manufacturer http://www.st.com/web/catalog/mmc/FM143/CL1814/SC1523/PF217469 - not something that can be guaranteed by the typical USB flash storage drive.

Gold plating is pretty much a standard when you're dealing with a USB connection unless you want it to break after a few connection cycles.

But yes, it will likely not last for 30 years if you insert it and remove it many times a day for 30 years (although in this case your computer port is likely to die first)

It is a good product but I think it needs more development

Ohhhhh,  it's made by the same people who were the foundry for Cyrix CPUs, you know, the ones that lasted 12 months if you were careful not to apply power...

Hey! What would the difference in security be from something like this to a paper wallet? Is there vulnerabilities in USD connecting?

MMXIV and BALLS have dedicated standalone staking hardware for months already

they're also the same people (actually the same business division and a variety of the same chip) making credit cards and passports. This is probably more closely related to the current use case.


a paper wallet is secure until you want to spend it - at that point the private key is revealed and a malware can grab it. Also, being bitcoin, it should not be vulnerable to US dollar connections (sorry, that was an easy one  ;D)


you don't want to start comparing the security of a smartcard and of a Raspberry Pi. Also, you might want to rename MMXIV now :)

I was looking to purchase a device to help me with secure cold storage.
I looked at the ledger wallet but thought it would be better for spending and storing small amounts.
The security card that goes with it makes it quite secure but i didn't see anthing about how to get coins out if you loose the card, does anyone know?

For my cold storage savings i ordered a Mycelium Entropy a couple of nights ago, with the research i did it looks like the safest way i can hold my coins.
Although it really is only a safe way to print paper wallets it will help me sleep better knowing that my cold storage hasen't been hacked due to one small mistake made by me while creating it.

it's a standard BIP 32 + BIP 39 + BIP 44 implementation, so you can restore it with any wallet supporting all of those. A few options are listed here https://ledger.groovehq.com/knowledge_base/topics/how-to-restore-my-backup-without-a-ledger-wallet


You would still have to pay attention when you actually need to use that cold storage. The best setup if you want to use your coins on a regular basis would be to use Mycelium Entropy to generate a seed that you put in a hardware wallet in my opinion.

I thought you had to use the code on the card, nothing code generated online and if someone got you ledger wallet it would still be no good to them.
I'll have a read though the link you provided.
Im not as tech savy as some so its probably a bit over my head but i pick most things up

I will be using Mycelium to generate the seed and transfer coins to one of my hot wallets in small amounts as i need it.
Never need more than about $50 in a hot wallet at any one time.

You need some second factor (the code on the card being one implementation) if you want to spend from the Ledger Wallet. If you lose the wallet, you have a recovery mechanism that you can use without it.


sure, that works, it's just more annoying and risk prone than doing it from a hardware wallet, especially if you want to stick to bitcoin best practices and never reuse keys.

Thanks, after all the research i did i think the Entropy is the best device for someone like me who is needs easy idiot proof cold storage. Nothing is perfect but this is close and pretty cheap.
I use https://www.livingroomofsatoshi.com/ to pay my bills now and another member helps me with some food but i dont spend more than once or twice a week.
Reusing keys was the one thing i didnt like about it but thought i could just transfer the ballance to a newly creted one public key after a couple of uses, is that possible?

Yes, you can do that, in your case it'd also be better to do the signing on a dedicated offline computer, if you are not doing that already.

This is what i am buying the device for, just to see what i can do safely with it. ATM  i do everything on my android mobile and only keep very small amounts of btc.
I want to start saving btc on a paper wallet created by entropy device then transfer what i need to my phone when required.
I will have to wait until i receive the device to try out the signing.
Thanks for all your help, i might PM you when i get it if thats ok with you.

Edit: i wish you were around a few days ago when i created this thread.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=909488.msg10007490#msg10007490

yes, that's ok, I missed that thread, but both devices have different purposes :

Mycelium Entropy acts as an as perfect as possible entropy generator when generating your keys or seeds - making sure that they are not compromised by a bad random generator (either by mistake or on purpose). It doesn't protect your keys when you import them or sign, this is left to the wallet implementation actually using the keys generated by Mycelium Entropy.

Ledger Wallet acts as an additional protection layer when you sign, making sure that the keys are not exposed and that you're signing what you wanted to be signing. It can be initialized using its own entropy source or any one you provide (such as one generated by Mycelium Entropy if you don't trust the chip entropy source)

Yup, you are probably right. Plus the technology is generally untested so you do not know what is going to happen as far as being able to manipulate the device until it is too late. The same goes with how the private keys are generated