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Comment by throwup | Hacker News Reader

Not everyone is cut out to be their own bank. Many people out there have the tech skills to use a hardware wallet and back up 24 words, but also many don't. Anyone in the second group who wants exposure should probably not use an exchange and instead hold out for an ETF (despite what the TV commercials say)

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And a fair number of people in the first group are overly optimistic, too. This is the kind of thing you can tell yourself you’re good at, but then life happens and people forget to practice or get sick/old/injured and this risks of losing everything are higher than you might like.

99.9% of people are not prepared and/or do not want to be their own bank.

That is why banks were invented in the first place: running around in the middle ages with bags of money was downright suicidal. Keeping it in your home was a bad idea because at any moment as plague or war could break out. From Japan to Italy every society came up with a centralised solution.

How reliable are hardware wallets? Seems like there significant risk of them either being cheaply made or backdoored.

For cold storage, I think hardware wallets are unnecessary and add risk of the supply chain of that device. Those manufacturers are good at marketing what they sell.

If your hardware wallet dies it should be merely an inconvenience, since your seed phrase can be restored to another device. Since it's an open standard, it's even portable between device manufacturers in case one goes out of business.

Your second concern is valid - choose a device that's been audited.

By the same companies that audit crypto banks?

No? A hardware security audit is completely different from a company financial audit. Use your head.

and how do they manage not to lose access to their exchange account?

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