Ledger Live: A mobile companion app for Ledger hardware wallets

The supply chain attacks/evil maid attacks are a much bigger issue, as pointed out in other comments.

One caveat is that laptops are commonly compromised and your security would depend on nobody stealing keys/passwords needed to access your database/password manager/whatever.

Having hardware token with paper backup, makes this harder. Having a lot of tokens creates a huge incentive for getting hacked.

If you have non trivial amounts of tokens under your control, you need to consider all the points of failure. Laptops get compromised in all sorts of ways and can be equipped with key loggers or worse. Unless you are a security expert, defending against a determined & skilled hacker is super hard. Most of us never get our setups audited by an expert and I'm afraid that a bog standard OS X/linux setup is probably only get you so far. Even if you turn on disk encryption and do all the rest of the things you are supposed to do.

So the advantage of a token is that it does not depend on your laptop being uncompromised and that it is a third party solution that can be scrutinized and audited. That being said, I'm not a big fan of having a proprietary software/hardware package and would prefer to trade in my ledger for a properly OSS platform. There are a few of these platforms but it is early days and I'd need it to support Stellar though. As far as I know, ledger is the only thing working with that. I own a few of those for this reason.

IMHO there's a big market opportunity for creating a secure, easy to use hardware token for ubikey/oauthn signins, managing blockchain wallets, and doing 2fa. Not impossible, but making open hardware/software platforms commercially is apparently still a big challenge. I'd buy several if the price and feature set were right . Assuming enough auditing/vetting has happened by people that are smarter than me, of course.

An on-chain contract holds your funds and requires some number of signatures to authorize transactions (for personal use usually 2, i.e. one from your desktop computer and one from your phone). That way at least you know two separate devices would have to be compromised to cause loss of funds. This also allows for interesting key recovery strategies like having a third paper wallet that is also authorized. You could use that as a backup key that would allow authorization of a new key if your phone were stolen, etc.

Very narrow attack surface (no USB or Bluetooth, only QR codes are used for communication), and more safety against the supply chain attacks make it a viable alternative for some particular threat models.

Since they also use react native, and npm is notorious for being exploit to distribute malware. I have a brief look at the package.json. Seems to be a typical javascript project where developers tend to put one more dependency for a simple feature rather than implementing themselves. So, if one of the hobbyist project owner's key is compromised or hand over their orphan project to somebody malicious to manage their npm, then they are screwed. Although same could apply to other language which have package management, npm is the worst among those. Do they ensure the dependencies are signed before building the binary? And always use the last known good version for building new binary? I really doubt.

That being said - there's virtually no privacy in most cryptocurrencies. Your Bitcoin/Ethereum/Ripple/... balance is fully public.