Bitcoin is often marketed as allowing people to be your own bank. The caveat, however, is that you have to take the responsibility worthy of a banker. It may sound simple; all it requires is to keep the private key safe, but the simplicity can be deceiving.
A Bitcoin private key is a long string of alphanumeric. They are all unique but look sort of like one another.While the entropy makes it hard to crack by random guessing, it is quite impractical to memorize for most.
Many people use paper wallets, which is the written or printed form of private keys. While this is a relatively secure way of storing the bitcoins, it is rather troublesome for those who need to spend their funds often. Many of them would rather use a third party online wallet service such as Blockchain.info, at the cost of increased risks.
The quest for paper wallet-grade security without compromising the convenience of online wallets led to what is known as hardware wallet.
Though nobody claims to be inventor of the Bitcoin hardware wallet, one of the pioneers who posited the concept is Clement Cap, a professor at University of Rostock in Prague.
In a 2011 speech, Prof. Gapdescribed the requirements of a Bitcoin hardware wallet as:
First Impression
My Trezor arrives in a square plastic-sealed box. Rip the wrapoff, you will see a sealing sticker. It has a warning message that reads: Make sure the sticker is intact before opening. Take this warning seriously because at stake is more than the 100 USD you paid for the device, but whatever amount of Bitcoin that you will trust it with.
Look at the Internet and it is not hard to get the impression that hardware wallets are reminiscent of mobile phones in the early days there seem no unified design language or standard to speak of. While some, with touch screens and wireless connections, look like smart phones, the plainness of Trezor reminds me of my first MP3 player bought over a decade ago.
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