I believe a good hardware wallet like a Trezor or Ledger are incredibly important for anyone with a significant amount of crypto. Especially if you intend to spend it, because there are examples of Coinbase shutting down accounts for buying from the 'wrong' vendor.Here are some important tips:Always order directly from the original manufacturer's website. Ledger and Trezor have authorized resellers but why even chance it?Your seed should NEVER EVER be converted into any digital form ever. It should never be entered into the computer for any reason, even restoring the wallet (use the 'advanced' method where you use the hardware wallet itself to enter the key). Ideally don't even make a photo copy of the key, because some printers/scanners actually store the image in it's memory for a while. Only manually copy your key by hand (of course quadruple check everything).Use the 'extra passphrase' feature on the wallet, which requires you to type another word when accessing the wallet, basically like an extra seed word. This way even if someone steals your seed, they will have to know the correct passphrase. The wallet does not 'remember' this passphrase, and each passphrase generates a unique set of addresses, therefore it will never say 'wrong passphrase'. You can use this for plausible deniability by creating one passphrase account and adding much less to it and say that's all you have. Or create one account with a 'shitty' passphrase in case it is brute forced, and a super strong one with your real account. It is impossible to tell if there are any other passphrase accounts so they'd probably stop after getting the decoy.Record your seed onto a durable medium. There are products like 'cryptosteel' which are great. At the very least, get some waterproof 'paper' like TerraSlate which is basically plastic paper. It cannot be ripped, and will survive a flood. Best safe to keep it stored in a waterproof container like a zip lock bag anyway.Consider a safe deposit box. Some people might argue this is not a good idea because safe deposit boxes have been robbed before. But I think it's worth it, especially if you use an extra passphrase word, because you'd probably hear about the robbery and be able to secure your funds before the robber could 1. Realize what your key even is - 2. Learn how to access a wallet using your seed 3. Realize you have another passphrase and brute force it.
Submitted May 19, 2019 at 12:12AM
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