Ledger Hardware Wallet Worth It?

[GoneRogue2018]

I purchased a Ledger Hardware Wallet to keep my coins and tokens on a secure device, away from my computer. Originally, I was thinking an encrypted USB wallet would work well, until I found I needed many software wallets to run this. I quickly abandonned this. But, I am having concerns about my Ledger in general. My concern is that I cannot make a paper wallet of it to have a true backup, which is not part of the Ledger company. How do you all feel about the Ledger device technology, and the company itself?

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[mk4]

An encrypted USB flashdrive wallet can work just as well as a Ledger Nano S, it's just that it's quite difficult for most people to make a usb wallet properly and safely. Hence a Ledger Nano S would be more sort of "noob-friendly".

Why do you need to make a paper wallet? You just have to write your recovery seed on a piece or pieces of paper just so you have a backup of your wallet if ever you lose or break your hardware wallet. Writing words on a piece of paper should be basic enough for people to do.

[GoneRogue2018]

An encrypted USB flashdrive wallet can work just as well as a Ledger Nano S, it's just that it's quite difficult for most people to make a usb wallet properly and safely. Hence a Ledger Nano S would be more sort of "noob-friendly".

Why do you need to make a paper wallet? You just have to write your recovery seed on a piece or pieces of paper just so you have a backup of your wallet if ever you lose or break your hardware wallet. Writing words on a piece of paper should be basic enough for people to do.

I am definately not a noob, but do want to enjoy to spoils of ease when it comes to managing my crypto portfolio. My fear with a Ledger is that I do not have direct access to the wallet. Don't know if thats the wording I'm looking for. I have my seed written down. But what if Ledger goes out of business? Then what? I cannot just rebuild my wallet on MEW with my Ledger seed. Excuse my noob-ness regarding how Ledgers work, if this is not the case.

[Kakmakr]

Your "paper wallet" backup for the Ledger wallet is the seed. You can make several backups of these seed words and then hide them in different locations. I own both the Ledger wallet and the Trezor and both of them have their Pros and Cons. Ledger was my favourite wallet, until they dropped the ball with the latest firmware upgrade. <It was not easy and user-friendly>

I still prefer the Ledger, because you can store a larger variety of Alt coins and the device is smaller and more sturdy than my Trezor. <Small metallic cover to protect the display screen>

[jseverson]

How do you all feel about the Ledger device technology, and the company itself?

They haven't suffered any major breaches as far as I know. It is somewhat daunting to trust a company with your money, so I understand your concern with wanting a paper wallet that has nothing to do with Ledger. That being said though, why not just create separate paper wallets? You can simply split your coins among the two.

If you feel that paper wallets are more secure because you don't have to trust any third parties, you could delegate your hardware wallet as your hot wallet and use paper wallets as cold storage.

[hase0278]

I am definately not a noob, but do want to enjoy to spoils of ease when it comes to managing my crypto portfolio. My fear with a Ledger is that I do not have direct access to the wallet. Don't know if thats the wording I'm looking for. I have my seed written down. But what if Ledger goes out of business? Then what? I cannot just rebuild my wallet on MEW with my Ledger seed. Excuse my noob-ness regarding how Ledgers work, if this is not the case.

Ledger Nano S only helps you generate seeds using bip 39 word phrase generation and if ever they they decided to close their company, you can still use your ledger nano S as is or import it's seed in a hardware, software or web wallet that supports or uses the same generation method in case you lost it. You just need those 24 words and your passphrase, or the rootkey of your ledger nano wallet written up in a paper in order to access it in case the aforementioned incident happens or if your ledger nano S broke. (I might be wrong since I said this based on my understanding of how ledger nano S works).

[DdmrDdmr]

You can restore Ledger Nanos S to a BIP39/44 compatible wallet according to the official documentation, so recovery is possible and migration in case of company folding.

Here are some articles that give you insights as to the recovery process if needed. Even if you don't require a recovery process, the steps shown should help to give you peace of mind on this matter:

To restore your Ledger Nano S if you lose or damage the device: https://support.ledgerwallet.com/hc/en-us/articles/115005297709-On-which-wallet-can-I-restore-my-wallet-if-I-lose-my-Ledger-device-
It can be imported into another Ledger Nano S, Ledger Nano, Ledger HW.1, Ledger Blue, Mycelium (smartphone), Bither (smartphone and desktop), Coinomi (smartphone) , MyEtherWallet (ETH/ERC-20) or MyTrezor.

I’d prefer not having to go through the process, but the option is there.

If I’m in the right, you could even have two devices pointing at the same underlying data and use either indistinctly (though I have not ventured to try this myself).
See: https://medium.com/@trionkidnapper/ledger-nano-s-restoring-a-device-using-recovery-phrase-d80051ecf17a

[cryptosec.info]

No matter what kind of wallet you use, even if it's a hardware wallet, a huge factor is how you store your seed.

and no, if Ledger ever goes out of business, you can still access your coins by importing your seed on multiple apps/software.

[MintDiceSupport]

But you CAN indeed import your seed into MEW to restore it if anything ever happened! Ledger and hardware wallets are definitely worth it. If having all your coins on one device scares you, you can diversify it a bit and have a large amount of coins kept offline on a ledger wallet while having some that are a little more accessible on a software wallet. Use them in tandem.

[trupero_uno]

As I heard and recently knew that Hardware Wallet is used by people as their security from cyber attack, but none perfect since each product has advantages and weakness.

[cryptosec.info]

As I heard and recently knew that Hardware Wallet is used by people as their security from cyber attack, but none perfect since each product has advantages and weakness.

True. There's no such thing as perfect security. Theoretically, everything is hackable. You just need to make it super difficult.