After some deliberation about what hardware wallet to use, I decided to buy Ledger Blue. I have made this decision because the device looked like what I imagined a proper hardware wallet should had looked like.
The device has performed as desired, however, overall, I feel that the tech is immature
Here’s why
- When fully charged, the device won’t start. It’s a bug. Will be fixed in the next release. Don’t keep it plugged into your PC or it won’t start next time you want to use it
- You have no choice but to use Ledger backend. Ok, for novice users using someone else’s full node may be convenient. If you are not a novice (didn’t do marketing research, but I feel that if you are mature enough to buy a hardware wallet, you are likely not a novice), that is a privacy bug (you are disclosing all of your addresses to a 3d party), and an annoyance. Let me elaborate on the second part. Ledger backend also has bugs. Several times I have submitted transactions which failed to propagate from the ledger server. With armory that is easily fixed – just clear up your own mempool, and you’re good to go. Not so with ledger. The issue with transaction propagation seems to be known to ledger developers and they plan on fixing it… sometime in the future. Because 1 month after I reported the bug, it’s still there. If you could switch to your own full node, none of that wouldn’t be a problem. But you can’t switch to your own full node
- Ledger chrome wallet is buggy and unfinished. For example, today in the morning, when I was trying to accelerate transaction, it proposed that I pay .5 BTC in fees.
- Device memory. Ok, if you buy a multipurpose device for 230 EUR, you would assume that you can install on it as many apps as you would want. This is not the case however. The device’s memory is very limited, and I can only use 8 apps at any moment in time. You will not be able to install all apps, available for ledger blue at the same time
- Apps themselves need more work. Let me elaborate. For example, you have 10 btc on your account, and you want to send .1 BTC to your friend. You start the device and the chrome app, and on the device you’ll see 2 transactions: 1) .1 BTC to FRIEND and 2) 9.9 BTC to UNKNOWNADDRESS. The device doesn’t show you whether you have access to address (2). So, if your browser is compromised, it can show you hacker’s address as change address, and you’ll sign it because you have no idea what that address is anyway
Conclusions
I didn’t try trezor, but I tried a few other hardware wallets, and all that I have tried were even worse than ledger blue. The device is to a good start and somewhat resembles what a good hardware wallet must be. However, I feel that Ledger inc didn’t invest enough resources into polishing the experience and making this wallet secure enough when you add user to the picture, and we may see some attacks on it in the future through the browser app