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Comment by NoidFonsense | Hacker News Reader

idk the whole point of hardware wallets is that they are supposed to be a simpler stack. But if you're using a closed source hardware wallet...

An old laptop with the wifi card taken out is more transparent and auditable. It just runs the ordinary open source code

But I just keep all my funds in a hot wallet, no multisig. And if I get hacked I lose it all. I think the answer is just have good security and dont get hacked. The risk of losing cryptocurrency will encourage security advances across the whole ecosystem. I think I will set up multisig eventually

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How do you update that open source code without network connectivity? How do you securely input long transaction data to sign?

> I think the answer is just have good security and dont get hacked.

So you proposed a way to be more secure, only to discard it yourself in favor of “just having good security”?

You don’t. It’s not networked. It doesn’t need updates.

In fact, updates are only a risk. You physically remove anything that can allow updates to happen + anything that allows wireless networking.

How do you actually use funds like this? I mean, I know this is set aside for later. But if you had an emergency, how fast could you actually spend it?

Trivially. You can simply read the keys on the offline machine with your eyeballs and set up a software or hardware wallet elsewhere to access the account.

What is the offline machine even doing then? Seems like you could replace it with a sheet of paper.

How do you do the math of generating the wallet keys with a piece of paper? Such a thing is technically possible but you wouldn't want to.

Then your scheme falls apart as soon as a backwards incompatible update is adopted by the blockchain.

USB flash or QR code to transfer data

I agree my approach is not great, I dont own a lot

I wonder if wallet is not a good or bad analogy considering it would make sense to have many wallets to distribute potential damage instead of being taken out in a single hit... UX issue?

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