Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Re: There is no Hardware wallet thread on first page of Beginners & Help!
by
witcher_sense
on 08/02/2022, 08:19:56 UTC
I feel important to note that user will not be able to restore the seed itself.
User will only gain access to funds (as long as he has access to working physical HW wallet and knows the pin).

In plain simple: Having a physical HW wallet + knowing it's PIN will not give access to seed.
Should later something happened with hardware (lost, stolen, malfunction...) or forgets the PIN  (or tries wrong pin many times) there is no way to retrieve funds.


Why not? Hardware wallets need access to your seed to generate private keys, addresses, and sign transactions. That means these seed words (albeit in encrypted format) are stored somewhere inside the hardware wallet. If they are stored, they can be retrieved especially when you unlock your hardware wallet with PIN-code thereby making your seed unencrypted. Moreover, some wallets can display your seed words in plain text if you request them to do that via "advanced options." That means if a hacker somehow knew your pin and has managed to access your wallet for a couple of seconds, your funds are no longer safe because an attacker has likely already stolen your main secret and will be able to spend your funds immediately or patiently wait until you make a larger deposit.