I created a wallet on an old Android Phone (around 2013, 2014) unfortunately didn’t purchased any coins (I regret deeply), but I had very small amount, like very very little deposited by others as test. For some reason I did a backup of the wallet in my dropbox account (I know, many people told me I did wrong, but it was just a wallet for testing, like I said, it was a small amount). Many years passed by and the phone no longer works, but I was able to recover both BTC and BCH (the wallet was before the split) thanks to the backup I did, and used a wallet on my work laptop then I transferred to the exchange company to cash out since I didn’t had any plans of using it and helped me as a test again.
I started purchasing btc and other cryptocurrencies like a year ago, and everything is on the exchange company right now. I want to transfer the money to a cold wallet, but I wonder how durable those pieces of hardware are. Some of those look like USB Sticks which are not very durable and with the experience of a phone no longer working, I fear losing everything if that tiny piece of hardware gets screwed over time. I know it needs to be a on safe and that is safer than in the exchange, but nevertheless the fear is there.
How has been your experience with those devices?
As long as you have your 12 or 24 word seed phase, it doesn’t matter if the hardware wallet breaks and stops working. You could literally throw it into a lake. You would just need to buy another one and enter your old seed phrase into it to recover your crypto
I would get a trezor t if this is a concern for you. As you don’t type the seed into a keyboard to recover it like the trezor one – but into the device itself. Sorry if that was a bit confusing lol
[https://bitcoinseedbackup.com](https://bitcoinseedbackup.com)
Backup your seed phrase on a steel plate like the one above and keep it in a secure location. That’s all you need to recover your wallet after the zombie apocalypse happens. The hardware devices like ledger or Trezor are merely convenient and secure ways to use your seed phrase to sign transactions.
Durability? Ledger X comes dead on arrival quite often, or fails randomly due to power connection issues internally. Newest Ledger Nano doesn’t support dozens of coins – not that that really matters since a big percentage of them won’t exist past this quarter..
The good thing about the cold wallet is that the device itself isn’t storing the coin, but it allows you safe access to your private keys. You could lose your device or it could break, it doesn’t matter. You keep the private seedphrase written down somewhere safe, as long as you have that you can access your crypto using different cold wallets.
This is why people buy gold. Your house can burn down, the safe can cook like a 2000 degree oven, the gold can melt and pool into various puddles on the ground. Then when it cools you can grab all the bits, whack them together into one piece with a sledge hammer, and your gold bar is worth exactly the same as when it started.