A Few Key Points to Correctly Choose a Hardware Wallet

[Bitpie Wallet]

The last round of the bull market has created a lot of wallet teams. Many of them have also designed a variety of hardware wallets. With all these hardware wallet products, how do you make choices?

As the only wallet team in China that has come through the previous round of complete bull-bear cycle and has never had a security incident for 5 years, we are going to tell you about the selection of hardware wallets.

 1.First, price is not the major factor in choosing a hardware wallet.
Remember, neither the more expensive the better, nor the cheaper the better. The current global mainstream, well-structured, safe and reliable hardware wallet price range is generally between 100 to 200 US dollars. If it is low, it may not guarantee good quality. If it is high, it may just try to make you think that the more expensive the better quality. The purpose of buying a hardware wallet should be to securely store large amounts of bitcoin and blockchain assets, rather than to show off. Therefore, security and reliability are more important. You should choose “iPhone” instead of “Vertu”. What’s more, for those who bought Vertu phones, others may feel that they’re rich, but buying the so-called “Vertu” wallet, people will just think you’re stupid.


2.Second, please choose an open-source hardware wallet solution.
The hardware wallet must be open sourced. In fact, the Bitcoin community had a broad consensus 5 or 6 years ago.
A fully open sourced, auditable, and verifiable hardware wallet solution ensures that third parties can’t be evil which truly meet the needs of users to securely store cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin without trusting third parties. Since you have already decided to buy a hardware wallet to take care of digital currency assets, why trust others? If you trust others then it would be nice to have the currency stored in a big exchange because you just want to find a trustworthy third party.
The “open sourced” here is referred to “truly open sourced”. In these 2 years, there is something not quite good happened in the blockchain industry, for the purpose of promoting, people made up “pseudo open source” (releasing a small part of the code, and telling the public that they are open sourced). This behavior in the open source community is actually awkward, but many users doesn’t know that. Remember, “truly open sourced” means that others can completely construct the identical products and services based on the open-source code.If we apply this principle to the hardware wallet making, it means a third-party engineer can easily make a fully same hardware according to the open-source hardware design; plus, as per the original open-source firmware code, he is able to compile, packages and write in the firmware to the hardware wallet. This is important because it is the only way to be truly auditable and verifiable. Under this condition, even the wallet development team ITSELF can’t be evil.
In this regard, the earliest hardware wallet maker — Trezor is doing quite good. Other Trezor followers and now the leading hardware wallet solution BITHD.com all strictly achieved open source.
BITHD and Trezor’s open source codes keep updating on github.com

3.Third, choose the hardware wallet team that keeps the product updated.
Since the development of the blockchain field is fast, in the traditional world, a software that is not updated regularly may still work, yet, in the blockchain world, the wallet that is not iterated for several months may be not usable. In this regard, you can always find some wallet products that have disappeared in the past few years and no longer update. Check if they are still working or not.
The bear market has been lasted for a year, no one knows how long it will last. Many teams, in the bull market, wanted to have a try or make a great coup by making a new wallet will hardly survive in this bear market. In this case, it is indeed important to choose the wallet solution that you want to use and purchase the hardware wallet products carefully.
For open-source wallet products, you can usually find the corresponding source code on github.com. By checking the source code submissions, historical versions in the repositories, you will know whether the team is doing things or not. Make your own choice carefully!
Trezor and BITHD are products with very fast version updates and very frequent iterations. For example, in the past 1 to 2 months, BITHD has released multiple versions. First, it provides Bitcoin multi-signature function that can be used by Xiaobai. Then It also achieved the world’s first and only hardware wallet that supports ETH and EOS multi-signature functions. While developing these features, it also developed several EOS DApp-related functions on the hardware wallet. The fast product iteration speed and the super wallet team cannot be compared to the others.
Now, if we tell you that, in such a busy research and development timeline, we, bitpie team, have also designed a new generation of hardware wallet, and the new generation offers 2 different types to meet the different needs of users, you should have been convinced.

4.Fourth, the hardware wallet must have a screen.
This topic has been fully-discussed in the Bitcoin community a few years ago. We have repeatedly reminded the teams in the industry to pay attention to this when designing hardware wallets. Unfortunately, there are still many teams made screenless solution.
Why does the hardware wallet have to have a screen? The reason is very simple, that is, users need to see what they are operating on the hardware wallet (for example, to send 10 bitcoins to 1 ABC… or to send 5 EOS to an EOS DApp contract, etc.) ; moreover, you have to confirm this operation yourself on the hardware wallet so that it is absolutely safe. If there is no screen on the wallet, you are forced to trust an external device (such as a computer or mobile phone). If you think twice before doing so, you would understand that it is unnecessary to buy a hardware wallet since you already trusted an external displaying and the safety therefrom.


In addition to the above 4 points, when purchasing a hardware wallet, you should also consider such things as your clear needs, team history, public opinion, hardware structure, and program model of this team. However, the most important thing is the above mentioned 4 major points.

In conclusion, when you are purchasing a hardware wallet, please choose a reasonable, open sourced, ever-updating, screen-based, well-structured hardware wallet product. Please carefully evaluate the contents of these 4 points before making your decision.

Bither/Bitpie Team

https://medium.com/@Bitpie/a-few-key-points-to-correctly-choose-a-hardware-wallet-76d76a7a54af

[IlVeroNico]

It helps a lot if the forum posts are well formatted, I suggest adding bold/italic to help the reader recognize easily the paragraph and the most important parts of the post

[FatBen]

I agree with IlVeroNico,
Well arranged points and formatting would make this a nice read. To be honest, i even hardly read a full paragraph. Sorry mate but i think its the reason your topic isn't attracting much audience.

[jademaxsuy]

Well those are one of the most important part when delivering a topic to your audiences by making the important word to BOLD, UNDERLINE and ITALIC in order for them to take NOTES for the important parts and also with the help of formatting of the content to be deliver. Some of it don't need to be long just to make it look like you put lots of effort to make it long and it may cause not good to read. Some are just short but brings a lot of lessons.

[Onuohakk]

Well I read the title of this post as "a few key points to choose a hardware wallet" put came to find out a mountain of a post to make your post more interesting and appealing you should have at least made it concise. Any ways I appreciate your efforts

[roptoshambrella]

Also there is a fifth one should be added to this topic.
Define your needs clearly.

For instance Ledger supports a lot of ERC20 tokens but not all.
Trezor supports all ERC20 tokens.
So which tokens or coins you need to put inside is another point and for me this should be at the beginning .

After you decide what you need you can look for the last four subject in that topic.

[LTU_btc]

For instance Ledger supports a lot of ERC20 tokens but not all.

I haven't tried to use ERC20 tokens on Ledger, but from what I read, you can use MyEtherWallet to manage all ERC20 tokens on Ledger.

[Kakmakr]

Your choice is simple, if you are into Alt coin trading, go for the Trezor <more expensive> and if you simply want to store some of the major coins, go for the Ledger. Both of these hardware wallets have a "clean" security history and they are easy to use. 

I own both of them and they are excellent value for money. The last firmware update on the Ledger Nano was a bit tricky, but I managed to sort it out and it is working like a charm.

Paper wallets has no software updates, so they are still the best for long-term storage. 

[DdmrDdmr]

<...>

Yes, that is the way I manage my ERC20 tokens, using Ledger Nano S + MEW to interface the to/fro TXs and normally Eherscan to follow check on them.
Currently, Ledger Live (software interface) does not support viewing ERC20 tokens, but allegedly, they claim to have planned to add the feature at some point.

[bitmover]

Yes, that is the way I manage my ERC20 tokens, using Ledger Nano S + MEW to interface the to/fro TXs and normally Eherscan to follow check on them.
Currently, Ledger Live (software interface) does not support viewing ERC20 tokens, but allegedly, they claim to have planned to add the feature at some point.

This is very annoying. I do that too,as I use Ledger to store my coins and I have some ERC20.


The biggest problem I see is that MEW has many security flaws. Sadly there is no other trusted third party desktop software such a "Electrum for ethereum" to use...

I found those tips from MEW about security, i think they are important even for hardware wallet users:
https://myetherwallet.github.io/knowledge-base/security/myetherwallet-protips-how-not-to-get-scammed-during-ico.html

[Bitpie Wallet]

Also there is a fifth one should be added to this topic.
Define your needs clearly.

For instance Ledger supports a lot of ERC20 tokens but not all.
Trezor supports all ERC20 tokens.
So which tokens or coins you need to put inside is another point and for me this should be at the beginning .

After you decide what you need you can look for the last four subject in that topic.

Thank you very much. Define your needs clearly is very important for a biginner.