How's it going everyone?
It's Austin with the Crypto Playhouse here, and as we've seen over the Holiday season,
cryptos are booming.
But, what good are all your Bitcoins if you can't keep them secure.
Today, I'm gonna kind of walk through why you should have a hardware wallet, how it
keeps you safe and how to get one set up.
In particular, we're gonna be looking at the Trezor today.
[opening music]
Alright, so what exactly is a hardware wallet and why do you need one?
Well, this is one of many hardware wallets that's available out there.
This one is the Trezor.
There's also the Ledger and a few others.
Personally, I think the Trezor is much easier.
It has a nicer interface and, honestly, it's actually a decent piece of hardware that's
kind of nice to look at.
Looks alright coming out of the pocket.
But one of the big things with the whole cryptocurrency movement is security and the blockchains themselves
are very secure.
Nobody's gonna been hacking Bitcoin anytime soon.
It's probably never gonna happen, but your individual keys where your wallets are stored,
those are subject to security flaws.
The blockchain itself holds everything and that will never break down, but as we saw
with Niccehash recently, they were keeping all of their Bitcoins on a single wallet online,
and that is how that whole $80 million loss situation occurred, because they were holding
those keys online.
It was accessible, somebody got in there, they pulled the money out.
The big thing about having a hardware wallet, 1 is your keys are not being held by the company.
If you have your money on Bittrex, an exchange, any of the main centralized exchanges.
If you have your money sitting in nicehash and it hasn't been paid out yet.
Basically, even though the money is "ready to be pulled," it's actually sitting on their
server, so it's something goes down with their server, if they get hacked, you get hacked.
You lose your money.
And that's the beauty of using a hard wallet like the Trezor.
By having this, I can put all of my keys on here.
I myself own all of the public and private keys, so if somebody that I'm interacting
with has a security breach or if I'm on an exchange, basically anything held in here
it's only subject to somebody accessing the device directly.
So it's really an added layer protection and chances are if you have your stuff on a hardware
wallet, you're at a far lower risk than keeping your private keys out in the cloud on the
internet.
All right, so there's a number of Hardware wallet options out there.
Personally the Trezor is my favorite.
I like the small form factor.
It's a little easier to read than The Ledger.
The Ledger is very small and it's a USB connector, so it feels a bit bulkier to me.
But you can get these from this site itself, trezor.io.
We've got a link down in the description.
But they're also actually coming out with the new Trezor Model T. I'm personally looking
at getting myself one, but unfortunately I missed the pre-sale.
Those are going to be available on quarter 1 of 2018.
I highly suggest you look into those.
They're looking at opening it up with a bigger screen.
Is going to be color, have a touch screen, and have an expanded support for a number
of more altcoins.
Anyways, right now I'm going to show you guys how to get in with the Trezor that is currently
out, show you how to get everything set up and how to initiate your first transaction,
so I'm going to plug this in and let's get started.
Alright, so it's a real simple set up process.
First thing when you plug it in, it's going to ask you to go over to�trezor.io/start,
which I've already got it here, so we're going to do this, scroll down here, and we're going
to just skip the update.
Let's get started.
All right, so the Trezor wallet interface is going to load up.
If you're using Chrome, you can get the extension.
You just download that directly to Chrome.
If you're using Another browser, there are windows application options, but I think that
the Chrome extension is much simpler, much easier.
This one I'm actually setting out for my mom.
She's been interested in Cryptos for a while.
I figured this would be a good New Year's kind of start off for her.
We're going to get her set up with the Trezor and she can hold things on there.
So it ask you for the name.
I'm just going to toss in let's say retirement.
And now we start to see one of the key features with a trezor.
Every time you pump in your PIN code, it brings up your little screen here and is like an
normal num pad, but every single time you plug it in, it's going to scramble those numbers
for when you punch it in over here.
Now the beauty of this, is even if your computer or whatever computer you're using the Trezor
with is infected with spyware or malware, because it's scrambled directly on the trezor
through the encryption algorithms, you can come over here and click the buttons for your
pain and it can't be tracked because it's being scrambled every time, so no matter how
many times you access it, nobody can figure out what that is.
So we're going to set in or first Pin here.
I'm going to do something simple.
She can change it when she gets it if she'd like to.
Now it does say, it goes from too easy to guess, it's fine and then I believe strong.
We're just going to leave it with its fine for a four digit PIN this time, so we're going
to enter that.
It's going to ask for a confirmation and noticed that when I did that the numbers have actually
re-scrambled, so once again, there's that extra security you're looking for.
We get that PIN, confirm it there and now it's going to have you set up your recovery
seed.
Now when you do this, you're going to have to have a piece of paper handy.
It's 24 words long and basically what this is is it's a set of randomized words that
generate by the Trezor's encryption algorithms and you can use these to recover your wallet
at any point if the device is lost stolen or something like that or if you believe by
some chance your security has been compromised.
So it's going to ask cuz right there on the trezor to confirm each of these words as we
go through them.
So I'm going to set this here.
This is gonna take a minute.
We'll have to...we'll speed through this.
Like store it up.
Uh huh.
[music]
Okay, so now that we've run through it the first time, it's going to ask you to do it
again.
So I know I got all my words correctly.
Just going to burn through these real quick.
When you're doing this yourself, you should be careful and make sure that you have everything
down perfectly as is, because if you lose this recovery seed and you lose your device,
you're out of luck.
Your coins are gone.
This recovery key is key to keeping around and also I should know that when you write
this down, find somewhere safe, a sock or underwear drawer.
Tape it to the underside.
Do not store it with your hardware wallet.
If somebody snags your wallet and they have your recovery seed, your security is out the
door.
There's no point in storing them together.
Sure there's separate in a safe place where you know you can find them.
All right so we confirm that last word there.
It's going to ask for the PIN.
Plug that in one more time and as you can see, scrambled once again, enter that in.
All right.
Now it's doing is first time boot up and as you can see here, we're opening up on Litecoin.
We also have Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, Dash, Zcash, Ethereum and Ethereum Classic
and it should also be noted that you can use one of their extensions with the MyEtherWallet
or Mycelium and you actually can't store any of the ERC20 tokens on here as well.
The Trezor T model is going to be introducing a lot more coins, but personally these are
some of my biggest holds anyway, so it's perfect for me.
Anywho, so now that we've got that setup, we're going to go on and get this first transaction
going.
So in order to do this, we're going to go over to receive and as you can see here will
generate your first Litecoin address and since I'm going to be sending my mom Litecoin, that
will be perfect.
So we're going to go over, copy this address and I'm just going to go right over to my
Bittrex wallet and reload this.
Well she wanted to get started, so we'll give her one Litecoin to kick things off and let's
see...
We're going to do a withdrawal, insert my Trezor address in here.
We're going to send it all over there.
Do it simple and there we go.
We're all set up.
We're ready to go.
So it going To each other, enter in my authenticator code.
As you can see, security is definitely a concern here over at the Crypto Playhouse.
We like to keep everything locked down.
If you don't have two factor authentication on Bittrex, I highly suggest it.
All right, there we go.
The withdrawal I submitted and it does take a few minutes for it to come over and be visible,
but after about 5 minutes you will see that first Litecoin transaction pop up here and
then the confirmation part will start out.
All right, so I have officially, successfully sent one Litecoin to my mom's new hardware
wallet and she'll be getting that on New Year's and get to watch that grow over the next couple
of years here and hopefully add some new coins to it.
So anyways, you guys have now seen how to set up a hardware wallet and why they're so
important, so we're kind of curious.
Let us know, what's your favorite hardware wallet?
Do you like our Trezor?
The Ledger Nano?
Ledger Blue if you're really throwing the big bucks at your Hardware wallet?
For the Trezor in particular and the Model T, we've got the link in the description below.
I highly suggest going and checking out their site, getting yourself rolling on your own
hardware wallet.
Anyways, if you liked the video, drop us a comment and subscribe to the channel.
[ending music]