A hardware wallet is a total waste of money in my opinion. Especially if you are a hodler.
I disagree. It's awesome and easy peasy to send small amounts of btc from my Trezor to my phone wallet to spend from there. Or just spend directly from the Trezor. All safe and secure.
I was not very BIG about hardware wallets, but once I tried out the Trezor and the Ledger Nano s, I found them to be very easy, and I gt a feeling of more security and more knowledge about how to store my bitcoins, as compared to my pre-hardware wallet practices, which also had included using the Blockchain.info wallet.
Between the Trezor and the Ledger Nano S, I find the Trezor to be faster and less cumbersome to use..
TLDR: using the hardware wallet can give you a different perspective about their utility
PS... I agree with several of the posters, that having your coins in a variety of places, can be helpful, but also keeping in mind the ways that the storage locations can be vulnerable will be useful too... and hopefully, more than one location would not be accessible through the same vulnerability... I do keep about 15% or so of my crypto value on exchanges, which is prepared for trading etc.. and some of those are secured by e-mail, password, phone authentication, and sometimes there could be vulnerabilities if one or more of those security keys are compromised.
I have a couple of Ledger Nano S, but don't fully utilize them. By default, it looks like Chrome extensions are the preferred interface, I don't trust that. Electrum on Linux supports it, I trust that more. I keep multiple paper wallets, one per year. If I get to the point of cashing out much, it's helpful to be able to have a hard date on the blockchain of when I owned it. I'm not sure how to incorporate that into Ledger. I know about the optional hidden space.
Opendime hardware looks cool, but it's more of a one-shot thing. Good for basic transfers off-chain. You can't easily back it up, and it may not accept going through the washing machine well.
Ledger have said they will be releasing a standalone application soon to for people who don't want to use the chrome extension:
https://www.ledger.fr/2018/02/23/announcing-new-ledger-wallet-desktop-mobile-applications/We’ll soon be announcing availability of the Ledger Wallet application. We’ll first release the desktop version during Q2 2018 and then focus on the mobile version Q3 2018. The new version of the Ledger Manager is also expected for Q2 2018. Stay tuned!
Good. This might fix some of ledger's bugginess, and quirkiness in loading, etc. Perhaps?