Bitcoin Q&A: Can You Trust a Hardware Wallet to Generate Your Seed?

Can hardware wallets be trusted to generate seeds for you? What are the risks of trusting these devices? How can you use them securely without making things too complex and causing yourself more problems?

Chapters
0:00 How can we minimize the amount of trust that we put in third parties?
2:37 How do we trust the seeds that are generated on these devices?
4:20 If you were to put millions of dollars in these devices, you probably need to take some precautions

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Andreas M. Antonopoulos is a best-selling author, speaker, educator, and highly sought after expert in Bitcoin and open blockchain technologies. Andreas has written two best-selling technical books for programmers, “Mastering Bitcoin” and “Mastering Ethereum”. He has published “The Internet of Money” series of books, which focus on the social, political, and economic importance and implications of these technologies. He is known for making complex subjects easy to understand and highlighting both the positive and negative impacts these technologies can have on our global societies.

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Translations of THE INTERNET OF MONEY:

[abedrole]

0:40 "Trying to do elliptic curve multiplication or hashing by pencil & paper is probably too difficult for most people"
=> Like this comment if you think he did just that for his own wallet xD

[Redreynard]

It's May 2023. The middle of the Ledger backdoor controversy. And I was not happy. But this video has helped me calm down a bit. .... I think that Ledger should make Andreas their press spokeman!

[cococrypto]

My advice is to check if your mnemotics are in a book and then write down the page, line and word number on a paper.
Even someone find your paper, you will not have to worry.

My second advice is to create a second mnemonic key and wallets and in case of emergency transfer all your assets on them.

[jllarivee]

Andreas should do a step by step tutorial on generating a seed by rolling dice or cards. That would be fun to watch.

[deaconjamesk]

I have bought every one of Andreas' books
They are awesome!
'The internet of things volume 3' just arrived and I will be reading it over the next couple weeks!

Highly recommend guys and gals! I have a question for Andreas...
50 Times multiplier is the figure I have heard in this space for a while


Can you explain why crypto has a 50 x Multiplier marketcap?
a)What contributes to create that?
b)Who sets it?
c)Could the multiplier lower in the future?

[margoomahony]

great question, well explained as always. Thanks again AA.

[chico]

Thank you! I've asked this question to myself numerous times.

[davids]

Great answer Anton, and thank you!
I have a few other questions.
We have 2048 word for 12, 24, and 48 word mnemonic phrases.
How many combinations are there?
Are there more possible ways to create wallets than this?
Will the world ever run out of private keys to be generated?
Lastly, an observation, it seems as though one could attempt to use dice rolls or some other form of entropy to generate a new wallet, but then randomly generate an already used private key and accidentally discover someone elses bitcoin.

[infatuationirony]

Great explanation! Would you consider doing a review on a non-open source BC-Vault wallet?

[baronsilverbaron]

Excellent. I would think that by far the most losses come from user mistakes. The simpler the hard wallet the better.

[gumed]

Respectfully, one should learn how to do all these steps to create an off-line seed, for the sole purpose of understanding the fundamentals, even if you are going to use a comercial hardwallet.

[irclaw]

How do we know the manufacturer doesn't keep a copy of the mnemonic phrase?

[xmenmerex]

I'm on Paper Wallet. Better than hardwares.

[televolna]

Making our own seed phrase...if I am right it has checksum and must be created according certain rules. Or not?

[PoppyRaid]

Elliptic curve calculations “Probably” to difficult for most people 😂👏✌️

[Ones_Complement]

How do you know the wallet is not generating a fake seed from your dice rolls with a private key already known by a malicious employee? If the answer is "you don't", is there a safer alternative?

[sl]

Surprised you didn't include "optional passphrase"

[Saribex]

Well we can have our own entropy for our 24 words with 256 physical dice (1-3 is 0, 4-6 is 0).

[chrisone]

What is wrong with Tails? I’ll take that any day over a black box which is connected to an internet device, not to mention it’s free

[Mrthfret]

How about owning a hardware wallet, transfer your crypto to it then create a paper wallet to store the bulk of your crypto?