I have a significant amount of ETH in a Ledger wallet. I store the wallet, along with the phrase words, in a safe in my house. I know it’s extremely dangerous to store the Ledger and the words together but I’m really at a loss as to the best way to secure these things. I’m not an active trader so I don’t need easy access to the Ledger. I used to store the ETH on Gemini but got nervous with the Earn debacle and took them off. I’m worried I’m no safer now than on Gemini. Any suggestions?
I memorized my seed, and am not concerned about anybody finding my physical paper backups. I bought one of those titanium plate kits to punch my seed into years ago, but then started to question if I really wanted a nearly indestructible copy of it lying around (say my place burns down and even my “fireproof” safe succumbs - the titanium plates may survive to be found by anyone), even if I used a cipher. I also have seven ledgers - two scattered around my house, one always stays on my person whenever I leave home, the rest are hidden around the country (with family, bank, secret) - I figure the chance of my place burning down and all seven ledgers failing at the same time is astronomically low. Also, keep a watch list of your important addresses on Etherscan so you get an email alert whenever there is any movement, so you can immediately take action if anything goes on you didn’t initiate.
Where you store the Ledger doesn’t really matter that much, you still need the PIN to do anything. If you’re comfortable with where your seed is, storing them together doesn’t make a difference.
Where you store your ledger is important. The pin you set is way less secure than the seed phrase. (It’s much easier to guess the pin than your mnemonic)
If anything I’d be more worried losing my ledger than an encrypted hard drive with my seed phrase on it.
The ledger can be erased/destroyed and all that matters are the phrase words. Access to your crypto is those phrase words.
Is your safe fire proof? Is your phrase stamped in metal?
People are way to paranoid about this stuff. The possibility that somebody breaks in and steals/opens your safe is very very very small. We don’t think that, because we see it on TV all the time, but that is not real life 😊
So if you don’t brag about how much crypto you have, it should be totally fine.
As been said by someone else already, if your seed phrase is in there, it doesn’t matter if the ledger is there too. The seed phrase would be enough for a thief
25th word stored in an offsite location or in your head.
Heard of many horror stories of people forgetting the phrase from their head
25th word lost ( if you dont go for the maximum length and have a general idea about what it was)is still recoverable, and just keep it in plaintext everywhere else on paper.
If you keep it alphanumerical, use like 8-10 letters, doable via brute force as well.
Yes this is what i do. Store the physical 24 seeds into a physical safe. Then create a paraphrase (25th word) and store it else where. Im ocd and paranoid so I will never lose this. If u dont have that responsibility sense, i dont recc doing cause if u lose 1 of them youre fucked.
Or write an email to someone with the words in. In a story or question about something. Don’t delete the email when they reply. Who’s going to know that contains your 25th word?
Extremely dangerous is probably an over statement. Your seed phrase is the most important thing. If you’re comfortable storing your seed phrase in the safe you should feel comfortable storing your ledger there too.
Maintaining your own keys, if you’re responsible, should make you feel more comfortable than using a 3rd party service.
If you’re paranoid keeping custody of your seed phrase you could split it up. Store half at your safe at home, half in a safety deposit box etc. you can also encrypt it and place portions of it in google drive/Dropbox/iCloud etc. just make sure you encrypt it locally.
The physical Ledger is as easy to crack as it is to guess your PIN in 3 attempts, which is…not easy. Your seed phrase, on the other hand, requires no cracking at all.
It’s not hard to safely store a seed phrase. Punch it in an inert metal and hide it in the substrate of your aquarium. Select a random book on your shelf and circle the words according to some kind of logic that you’ll remember. Bury them in a canister somewhere you can access. Concert them to their corresponding numbers. Put them in a safety deposit box if you trust your bank. Split it into a couple of pieces. Write it out of order, provided you know the cipher. What makes the most sense for you depends on your situation. The idea is to be inconspicuous, but also, they’re just words and not very special or interesting ones at that–hell, I might have typed some of your words in this comment. It’s the order that matters, so the main thing is to not draw attention to them like “here is a group of words that clearly has some significance”.
Ideally, you want a hypothetical thief to not know you have crypto at all. If I break into your house I’m going to assume the safe contains something valuable. If I’m just a casual thief I’m probably not prepared to mess with safes, so that’s fine, but let’s pretend I’m a pro and either break in or lift your safe (a quick tour of the Lockpicking Lawyer’s YouTube channel will show why confidence in anything short of high-end safes can be misplaced). Anyway, so I get inside, and here’s a weird USB thingy and beside it is a set of important-seeming words. Even if I know nothing about crypto, it’ll take me about 30 seconds of Googling to realize this discovery is very interesting indeed. To that end, unless you have a very good safe, I would argue you’re better off hiding your Ledger somewhere a thief isn’t going to be interested in in the first place, like in a baggie in the bottom of your flour jar in the pantry or something.
Conversely if a bad guy KNOWS you have crypto and cares to get it, he’s not going to mess with breaking in or decrypting your stuff. He’s going to social-engineer you into giving up your keys or (even easier) threaten Unpleasant Things ™ against you or someone you love if you don’t hand them over. So again–the best defense is keeping it completely secret that you have crypto at all.
Having said all of that: Many folks who hold crypto get into it because they have anti-establishment views, and like to imagine that bad guys or The Man are lurking around every corner just waiting to poach their crypto. For the most part that isn’t really true, and you’re way more likely to lose your assets due to some kind of stupidity or inattention on your own part. So there’s an argument that all of this is overanalysis. But, to the extent that there are indeed some bad guys out there and there are some real risks, not attracting their attention in the first place is always the best strategy.
I split my seed phrase in 2 and keep them in separate places, just in case.
Use zengo that has the bwst security, built-in firewall, and a legacy option. No seeds to worry about as it uses state of rhe art MPC technology.
Hide your seed phrase written on a paper with a bunch of old random papers like a filing cabinet or drawer full of random as papers and just tuck it in the middle somewhere no way even if a robber came he would look through every single paper
Keep the words in a safe written inside a book or whatever and the ledger in a drawer and you’re unfuckable