Here is what I use:
Cost me a few satoshis and I've been saving my bitcoins on it since last year. I don't see the point of hardware wallets if you are in bitcoin to hodl them.
To spend them actively i would still use my iphone for the job insead of hw wallets since I would carry my wealth in a paper wallet and my play money on my phone. But most importantly, it is just easier with a phone.
To me money spent on hw wallets is a waste. I would buy more crypto instead.
It's really all about the value of the amount you are storing, and therefore the risk.
Paper wallet is fine for smaller amounts, but...
- Where do you store the paper wallet safely
- What happens if you are burgled and the thief steals the wallet (wether or not they know what to do with it)
- Where do you store a backup, (and increase the risk of compromise)?
- What happens if your house burns down?
- Something gets spilt on the wallet and obscures the ink.
- 3 Years later, and you've simply lost the wallet, or thrown it out accidentally.
- When you spend the wallet and enter the address into a computer, are you 100% sure that computer is totally free from trojans/viruses, an attacker could steal the funds on the happy day when you cash-out.
These risks are small (ish) but if you had $100k or $100m, they would be much more important.
A paper wallet requires multiple diverse location copies, but each copy increases the risk of theft, and you need to trust someone else to look after other copies (family?)
So you can securely split the secret (Shamir's secret splitting
https://iancoleman.io/shamir/) , you can then choose how many parts of the total eg. 2 of 3 are needed to reconstruct the private key,
Then split it - 1 copy with a good friend or your lawyer, 1 with a family member, and 1 in your safe.
As its 2 of 3, 1 person can lose their key and its not a problem, and both the family member and friend need to collude to steal you coins.
You could of course increase this from 2 of 3 to any value such as 4 of 7, whatever makes sense to you.
When you come to spend the paper wallet, you should use a clean machine, install a new version of the OS ,and then only the wallet software.
I wouldn't use brand new software releases and I would check the authenticity of the code using release signing keys or hashes.
If you really want to do it properly, you should probably read Glacier protocol
https://glacierprotocol.org/, it discusses all the risks and possible solutions, you can then cherry pick the things you think are important to you.
You want to also factor in your own death to the scheme. Making sure 'your' people know about, and can actually get possession of the coins without you.
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