When you orange-pill your friends, your family or your girlfriend, you should also sit down and have the talk.
The talk about self-custody. I know, it’s awkward. All that writing down, the words, the bored faces. The technical jargon that needs to be explained. It’s not a good experience for anybody.
After all, we have been hand-held all our lives. If we lose our debit cards, the bank will replace them. If we lose our PIN, there’s a process online to reset it. It might be an inconvenience sure, but there’s a way.
True self-custody and making sure you have your funds secured on your own or it’s just gone, that is an alien concept for most.
And trust me, I’ve worked IT at Wind Telecommunications, there were grown men and women earning higher salaries than either you or I who couldn’t be trusted with a couple of fucking passwords.
But you know that the awkward talk has to happen and you have to sit down for like thirty minutes and explain the concept to them.
So, once you do that, wonderful. Now what? Which wallet do you point them towards?
I suggest you get them a Trezor Model One. Here are 5 reasons why.
It’s Inexpensive
The Trezor is one of the cheapest hardware wallets available. It’s the perfect choice to present as a gift. That doesn’t mean that it’s lacking in security features.
Granted, it does feel a little cheap when you hold it. It’s softer than a flash drive and very light. But it’s brilliant in its simplicity. A plain, clear screen, two buttons, one way to plug in your USB cable. That’s it.
It’s cheap enough to convince someone to get it without dipping too much into their early stack, it’s cheap enough to gift it. If they don’t bother much with bitcoin, no big deal. And it’s cheap enough to replace if it gets lost.
A hardware wallet is always the most cost-effective way to have the maximum amount of security with the least amount of money.
The Trezor Suite Is Very Easy to Use
The accompanying program is called Trezor Suite. It’s very clean, easy to read, easy to comprehend. These are your wallets. Now you’re prompted to press the button on the device and confirm.
Simple, easy.
It might even be exciting, making the new bitcoiner feel like a hacker or something by doing something tactile.
Anyway. The point is that all the features a newbie might need are there in plain sight, while at the same time some advanced features are just waiting to be used. Fee control, labelling, extra wallets, even OP_RETURN to carve your own message onto the blockchain, it can do anything you want. I’ve only had some trouble with signing a message to connect my Trezor to my Relai wallet and buy the sats directly into cold storage. They said they fixed it but it still didn’t work for me. It’s no big deal, just something to note.
Apart from that, the Trezor suite makes it easy to label transactions, and you should teach the newbie how to label them because there’s no way you’re gonna remember what went into what after the prices change and a year passes.
You can control wallets in parallel, all shown in tabs.
The totals are shown in graphs, it’s all right there. You can basically run an entire business out of it if you needed to.
Best Practises Are On By Default
There are so many small but important features that are on by default on Trezor. When you input your first seed phrase, it generates a few words at random to intersperse. That means that even if a keylogger was running on that computer, the hacker would have been left with 32 words in a random order. That reduces the chances of one intercepting your seed words.
Also, when you generate a receive address, it makes a new address every time. That’s just good practice.
When accepting or sending sats, you have to click two times and confirm by pressing on the button right on the Trezor. That drills in the importance of double-checking to the bitcoiner.
There’s a prompt to make a protected wallet with a passphrase if you want.
There’s an option to blur all balances.
Small things like that that are important.
You Can Install the Bitcoin-Only Firmware On It
You can now go to the settings and install the bitcoin-only firmware on it. No shitcoins at all. That reduces the possible attack surface, and keeps the shitcoin talk to a minimum if it’s a new user.
That’s always good.
It’s Open Source
What does that mean? Simply put, the code that it’s running is available for anyone to check it. You might not have the skills to audit code, but a lot, and I do mean a lot, of cypherpunks and hackers and passionate bitcoiners have gone through it with a fine tooth comb, looking for any weird things happening. Trust me, there are people out there who would be delighted, absolutely delighted to expose one of the top bitcoin wallet companies for doing anything nefarious with the code they’re running on their machines.
So it’s not exactly safe, anything can be hacked after all, but it does reduce the risk as much as humanly possible.
There you have it, five reasons to get that Trezor Model One for your first bitcoin wallet.
I suggest you always order your hardware wallets directly from the source company, and not from resellers.
Get yours here. https://loveisbitcoin.com/trezor
Did you enjoy this story? Then send some sats to the author!
100% of your tips go directly to the author. Need a wallet? Find one here.
