This is so wrong on so many levels and I just can't wrap my head around it. I just hope the market will punish Ledger accordingly, but I don't have much faith.
All the more important to keep calling this for what it is: A backdoor. Not an option. A backdoor. Your only option is to pay for the privilege of accessing the backdoor as well.
Remember when Trezor and Ledger were the two best hardware wallets out there, and every thread had people (me included!) recommending either/both of them. How the mighty have fallen! Both are complete and utter trash now, completely ruined by awful decisions such as this one. Seriously, do the management teams behind both wallets understand nothing about bitcoin?
What happened with Trezor? I remember a seed extraction hack from a couple years back, but that one still required physical access which makes it not even nearly as bad as what Ledger is doing.
Ledger have just admitted that their entire design is deeply flawed.
Reminds me a bit of that scene in The Big Short:
"I don't get it. Why are they confessing?"
"They're not confessing. They're bragging."
what i also wonder is what happens to the Legder sticks that don't go through this update - can they continue to be used without problems?
Probably. But you can't ever be sure that this backdoor hasn't been there all along, as pointed out by others upthread.