Well, the day I've been dreaming about for some time, was realised yesterday. Although my time in crypto-world isn't nearly as extensive as many other steemians, I've learned a lot in my time of buy/holding/selling main cryptos & alts.
The main concern for me, has always been "How trustworthy are these online wallets?"
The past 2 weeks especially has scared me a little, in that these wallet sites just go down without notice and, as was the case with coinbase, was offline for 6+ hours recently - which also coincided with a significant market correction, and no access to coins to buy/sell.
So, about 3 weeks ago, I ordered my trezor.io cold-storage wallet. I'd been playing around with the concept of cold-store via paper wallets, successfully creating, loading then unloading on them, and really liked the freedom & responsibility of personally being liable for my own balance. If I can't trust myself to hold on to my coins, why would an online wallet provide me any more certainty?
Moving the last of my Ether over to trezor.
I've now successfully moved my ETH, BTC & LTC across, and found the trezor was really easy to setup & use. It's light, compact & has additional redundancy via a seed-phrase, which allows through damage/loss, your wallet to be downloaded again to another trezor, or via their own wallet for transfer out.
The process was pretty straight forward, with some exceptions. Litecoin has recently moved across to a new address structure, whilst the trezor works on the original M-address syntax. However, with little to no knowledge of this, the guides & prompts were pretty straight forward & managed to get even the LTC across.
Currently trezor uses MyEtherWallet (MEW) as a quasi-escrow between sender / receiver (trezor) and vice-versa. However, this doesn't present any risk, as trezor holds the power, and unless connected, MEW cannot receive your ETH, and solely acts as a gateway to your trezor.
The trezor unboxed. Source: bitcoinsinireland.com
So far, they've got a small offering of coins only, but in the short-time I've been following them, they've expanded to what's there now, so let's hope we see them move towards more alt's like the nano-s has.
Is it fool-proof? Can I lose my coins? Well the short answer is yes. I could lose/destroy my trezor and lose my 24 word seed phrase. However, I like to think that I can cover myself sufficiently to recover, so will break my seed-phrase into 2 lots of 12 and leave one with a friend and one with my wife (and some other ninja strategies to triple-cover myself) To download back into a new trezor, you still need my PIN, which isn't a typical 4 digit one that the banks issue you with.
I feel far safer & more secure I've taken cold-storage on board myself. Regardless of what's happening in the market, I have an easily-accessible device that's accessible 24/7 and not reliant on faceless wallets that have proven to the crypto community that they're breakable and unreliable.
And I've updated my cloud mining contracts to dump my ETH directly to this wallet too, so only paying approx 0.001 ETH per 0.5 ETH transfer, and not the $2-3 charged by coinbase or the others.
Please comment below if you would like to know more, as I'm sure this information is general for many of you, but I was looking for as much info as I could get my hands one when I started. Also, I'll be making a post on how to create, load, and unload paper storage for BTC in the future, so will share with the community when it's done.
Happy to share more with others personally if you want to know more about them. One step closer to FREEEEDOM!!
Have a great day everyone!
