So yesterday I received my Ledger nano s. Its a hardware crypto-wallet, storing all your hard-earned coins in a safe, secure, offline fashion. Now, i’m not a huge crypto-baron, sitting on billions of $$$ of XRP/XMR/BTC/ETH/…, I’m a casual miner. Still, $ is $, and you want to HODL in style and safety.
First, a word of note, it seems there are some miscreants selling these devices on Amazon, Ebay, etc., that have pre-initialised the secret key, and give you a ‘scratch card’ to reveal it. When you buy one, enter an incorrect pin 3 times to reset it, don’t use it as-is.
Using the Ledger S is an exercise in hoping between apps. There is a chrome app to manage the device, and a chrome app for Eth and BitCoin. But a desktop app for XRP. And, for each, you have to exit and switch to the other, on both your PC **and** on the device. So many clicks and button presses. But, it works.
The Nano S also acts as a U2F and GPG/SSH key device, and, if it were a teeny bit more convenience, I could see using it. But as it is, to open it, enter pin, enter the U2F app, um, its a bit slow.
After transferring all my hard-earned Eth to it, and my minor number of XRP, I was saddened to learn that XMR is not yet (and might never?) be supported due to the ring signature. [[Hmm, seems it’s in progress so I’ll not be too pessimistic]].
Will I go hard-core into mining and fill my house with open-frame video cards hung by string? No way. Will I continue to let the newer idle machines mine while I’m not using? Sure, it seems they are earning net about $15/day across the CPU + 1080TI (machine learning card). If I can figure a reliable way to have the desktop RX380 add to the pool I guess we’d be in the ~$25/day range, and to quote president dale on this eve of US Government shutdown “and that ain’t bad“.
So, all you insecure HODL’ers, who’s in to get one? Its complex and rough around the edges, just like the rest of the crypto-ecosystem!
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