[krono]

  > Creating good randomness is a daunting task - Ledger devices rely on dedicated silicon logic in our certified smartcard chips that have been the gold standard of secure industries for the past 40 years to guarantee high quality randomness and tamper resistance.

Which is worthless and entirely irrelevant when they keep leaking their customers' personal and purchase data (which they claimed not to collect or keep, and even failed to delete after the first leak) time and again.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221030030843/https://cointeleg...

https://web.archive.org/web/20220901153130/https://www.coind...

https://old.reddit.com/r/ledgerwalletleak/comments/ki1nsz/re...

https://old.reddit.com/r/CryptoCurrency/comments/rts1w2/got_...

https://twitter.com/yeolddoc/status/1353139243548364805

[nintendo1889]

Which is why we transfer small amounts to the wasabi hot-wallet, coinjoin, and then spend. Each spend is then joined with another spend to obfuscate every purchase.

It requires careful budgeting for future purchases (as the coin-join takes time).

Trezor now has experimental support for directly coin-joining bitcoin that is stored on the cold-wallet, but I don't think anyone should trust it.

[justinator]

Not to be snarky, but this sounds real convenient.

Why don’t we just admit these tools are just fundamentally broken?

[hospitalhusband]

When your funds get low just open your hot and cold wallet apps and type in how much to transfer, wasabi takes care of the rest.

It's easier than merely logging into my bank. Or paypal (which unintentionally locked me out for over a year after a broken tos update that I couldn't accept).

People have had hot and cold wallets forever, they just call them wallets and banks. It is the same workflow, except without:

Driving, operating hours, showing ID (oops my (hot) wallet got stolen/left at home. Now I can't withdraw from my bank until that's sorted.), the horrible password requirements, barely usable websites, and spyware apps that may or may not work on rooted/libre operating systems.

It's the legacy banking system that is fundamentally broken.

[justinator]

>It's the legacy banking system that is fundamentally broken.

I can't think of one time funds from my checking account were wiped out because of a browser extension.

[hospitalhusband]

Yet many merchants are the victims of chargeback fraud, and many others have had funds frozen with no recourse. A paypal glitch left me unable to access my funds despite spending far too much time and energy trying to resolve it.

How many employees does trust wallet have? How funded are they? I am completely unsurprised that this happened to web3 trash. This is more of an indictment of the vc funded 'move fast and break things' attitude that pervades this site and 'web3' than it is of the greater cryptocurrency community.

[justinator]

"It's everything else that's broken, not us!" is the battle cry of crypto. You may as well cry, "wolf!"

[tiedieconderoga]

Is it really a "cold wallet" if you can quickly transfer funds out from a smartphone app, and that process is easier than using a banking app?

[olalonde]

Compared to what? The only realistic alternative here is mailing cash, which is arguably more inconvenient.

[Retric]

Why not use those gift credit cards loaded with cash if you want anonymity for less effort?

[rt4mn]

with the caveat that I dont personally use bitcoin, I still think the above description is simpler then using gift credit cards, for a couple of reasons:

- gift cards involves getting in a car and driving to a place to buy them, which introduces annoying logistical issues

- the purchases made on a single card are linked together, so you have to keep track of cards you use for x store and what cards you use for y product (this is also true with bitcoin though, which is why I prefer other more privacy-focused cryptocurrencies)

- with gift cards there is a very high chance that your funds will be rejected or flagged as suspicious. which also limits the amount you can spend to around 100-200 dollers, since any more risks having all the money you put into that card flushed down toilet

I do personally keep a couple of gift cards on hand for the rare occasion I find myself needing to pay for something online and there is no alternative vender that accepts cryptocurrency (usually event tickets or membership subscriptions), but its a pain and I much prefer paying for things with cryptocurrency.

Cryptocurrency is an unregulated and environmentally disastrous ecosystem rife with monopolistic vender lock in, fraud and abuse, and little to no accountability or legal recourse for end users. But that's also true with the credit card / debit card / other electronic payment ecosystem.

At least with cryptocurrency I get a modicum of privacy.

[olalonde]

Not to mention that you can't do peer to peer transfers with credit cards. The recipient needs to have a merchant account.

[SkyMarshal]

They’re broken b/c they’re having difficulty doing something no other electronic payment even attempts to do?

[dustyharddrive]

They’re making up for the fact that the history of every transaction input is public, something no other payment system even attempts to do.

[hammyhavoc]

Because people are still HODLing their dIaMoNd HaNdS.

[lxgr]

These data leaks are indeed very bad, but in what way do they make the actual core product and its security goals "worthless and entirely irrelevant"?

[krono]

What good is all this super reliable gold-standard encryption when its provider has shown to be so incredibly careless with the exact sort of information this solution is meant to protect?

Whatever security goals they claim to pursue exist only in their marketing copy.

[DennisP]

The point of good randomness is to keep other people from just directly draining your funds by breaking your key. That has nothing to do with any data held by Ledger, since they never see your key.

The data leaks don't affect that, though they're still a serious problem since they exposed customers to different sorts of attacks.

[lxgr]

Properly operating/securing a web shop and developing a secure embedded device are two pretty different skill sets, and I'm quite impressed with the quality of their security team's research concerning the latter.

Of course they should be doing both, but there's an easy, pragmatic workaround until then: You can just buy their devices on Amazon. (This does somewhat increase the chance of supply chain attacks, but that's always present, and I believe Ledger devices support hardware attestation in addition to tamper protection.)

[renewiltord]

Wait, that's neither worthless nor irrelevant. You can't take all my money using my personal and purchase data.

[krono]

They sell security, whilst habitually neglecting to secure their shit. Who knows what it'll be that's compromised next.

For being offline wallets, their products sure do come with many connectivity options and live/online service integrations.

[DennisP]

Ultimately the point of a hardware wallet is to connect it to a blockchain somehow, without losing security.