Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Hardware wallets still aren't secure, and they never will be. Use paper wallets
by
PrimeNumber7
on 13/07/2019, 07:06:57 UTC

If you take a paper wallet out of your safe to spend some of your coin, someone could take a picture of your paper wallet to compromise the seed, minus your passphrase.

This should never ever ever be done. Sweep everything. Newbs do this and their change is sent to a change address that they don't have private keys to. Yet another way user error is going to screw you over if you don't know what you're doing.   
You are being ambiguous as to what you are specifically meaning when you refer to a "paper wallet", maybe intentionally for security purposes, but this makes it difficult to address the shortcommings of what you describe as a "paper wallet". Dito for the machine you will use to sign transactions and generate the private key.

In the above post, you strongly imply you will use each paper wallet for exactly one transaction that you spend.  In the same post, you also say your air gaped machine does not have any kind of HDD. In this post you say you have not used a printer for creating paper wallet for a year.

This creates a number of issues, some of which do not exist for HW wallets:

Change addresses:
Every time you spend a transaction, you will need to either generate a new paper wallet, or access a previously generated paper wallet. If you are doing the former, you are consistently not having backups of your paper wallet immediately after you spend each transaction, and if it is the later, you are at risk that I describe in what you quoted. If you are not using a printer, you will have to write down the address, and manually type the address when you create a transaction, both of which are very prone to error; there are checks in place to prevent you from sending coin to an incorrect address due to a typo, but you may find yourself unable to send coin to a change address. If you have change addresses stored with your paper wallet, you are also at risk that someone will tamper with the change address listed, tricking you into sending coin to the address of an attacker.

Getting the private keys on paper:
If you are not reusing a paper wallet, you are strongly implying you are generating a single private key verses a seed. If you are hand writing the private key onto paper, you are at risk of transposing digits, which would lead to a near certain loss of funds. It would be possible that you use a seed a single time, but this would be strange IMO.