Topic: Ledger introduces “hardware” BTC wallet - page 2. (Read 1499 times)

IMO, you should treat hardware wallets like a petty cash box, good for day to day spending amounts. What you don't want to do is commit large amounts of coins to them, stick them in a safe and forget about them.

Some of the perils of using a hardware wallet as long term cold storage may be:

Battery Malfunction; high likelihood of any battery going dead beyond recovery, if internal.
Battery Malfunction; could leak or corrode, causing damage mere battery replacement will not fix.
Software Rot; "bit rot", while cosmic rays may cause unnoticeable and recoverable errors in running systems, errors may accumulate, uncorrected over a period of months and lead to unrecoverable data loss.
Obsolescence; changes to core or seemingly minor changes to protocol, or even the odd fork may affect how the wallet works, there will probably be workarounds, but possible need for technical expertise and experimentation to use or recover.
Solder Metallurgy; Since the advent of lead free solder, we have been inflicted with many piss-poor substitutes, they can have alloys come out of solution over time, form whiskers and crystals, go brittle, oxidise, add all manner of bizarre failure modes. Only some of these failure modes are related to thermal cycling, some are age dependant.
Component Chemical stability; Capacitors in particular have been plagued by failures from this.  

If you like to gamble, gamble a little less by powering it up every 2 weeks. This should allow error correction to clean up the odd instance of bit rot before it accumulates, it keeps a battery in more viable condition, if anything is beginning to fail, it may be noticed in flaky behaviour, in which case recovery operations can proceed immediately. If it has gone dead in 2 weeks, then other recovery options are more likely to succeed, i.e. battery or capacitor secondary corrosion will be minimal and will clean up, solder failures have higher likelihood of responding to homebrew reflow techniques etc etc. whereas left for months unnoticed, damage may accumulate to a point that is not recoverable.

Smartcard hardware wallets offers the same level of security than paper wallet, and even more.
A smartcard is garanteed 30+ years, it resists water damage, and it is PIN protected.

If you absolutely don't need to use your bitcoins, then yes, paper wallets could be an option.
But if you need to do payments and want to always have with you your Bitcoin "stash", then hardware wallet it is.

Trezor is better any day. But that is only if u r fascinated about hardware wallet. I think for security, there is no replacement of a paper wallet.

The Ledger Wallet Nano connects to your computer through the USB port, but is not a flash memory. It contains a secure element (smartcard), protecting the seed of your Bitcoin wallet.

You can see the wallet in action here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFvHq8zEgd8

A full review by Coindesk here:
http://www.coindesk.com/review-ledger-wallet-nano-provides-premium-security-budget/

Wow, it's a good product
But, which one is better ? This one / trazor ?

Anyway i think this is not too expensive

Hmm, is this just a glorified USB with password protection? The link doesn't give much at all.

Ledger BTC wallet is claimed to be one of the world’s safest and most user-friendly “hardware” wallets. And there is even better news – you can order it already.

- Read full article HERE