Bitcoin is big business. Despite its use in high-profile criminal endeavours like the infamous Silk Road, popularity of the cryptocurrency – developed by pseudonymous engineer Satoshi Nakamoto and driven by armies of ‘miners’ devoting computing resources to verifying transactions – is on the rise. Entire markets, from payment processing to the sale of mining hardware, have been born on its back, and it’s now entirely common to see mainstream companies accepting Bitcoin as a payment method.
It’s hard to ignore the negative headlines, though – the stories of online Bitcoin exchanges losing millions of pounds in funds to malicious attacks, untrustworthy staff, or simple incompetence.
For businesses accepting Bitcoin directly, rather than through a payment processor which automatically exchanges the cryptocurrency for fiat currency, it’s an undeniable risk, which only increases for those holding larger quantities of Bitcoin in an effort to benefit from its rapidly increasing value.
Enter the Ledger HW.1.
Hard security
The Ledger HW.1 is one of a new breed of Bitcoin-specific security devices dubbed ‘hardware wallets’. Where traditionally a Bitcoin wallet takes the form of a file on a computer protected with a passphrase, the Ledger HW.1 stores the private key associated with the wallet …read more
Source:: techradar.com – PC and Mac
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