Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

theli0nheart

Why do you prefer physical hardware over plain paper?

View on HN

The selling point of hardware wallets is that they do the signing for you, in an assumed safe sandbox.

I believe to make an analog with paper, you would:

- Spin up an offline VM with some bitcoin wallet software capable of doing offline signing.

- Import your private key

- Import the transaction data in a controlled matter, e.g QR code

- Sign the transaction

- Transport the signed transaction back to an online device in a controlled manner, e.g QR code

- Publish the transaction with the online device

Ah, that makes sense. However, if you're not interested in spending, just storing for a long period of time, they are more or less equivalent in terms of security, I'm assuming?

Yes, I'd say so.

You would probably not own a hardware wallet without storing the keywords for recovering the private key on paper (or similar). At that point it is more or less how you store the paper that will affect your level of security.

One use case to consider is that your successors in interest are the ones doing the spending. I.e., you are dead. It would be such a shame if they typed the private key into the family's malware-infested Windows PC and then wondered why the balance was zero.

A hardware wallet firewalls your loved ones from that risk.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com