Trèzór Wällèt - A Hardware Wallet

The only fee for the Trezor Model T is the purchase price, which is $215. Trezor doesn't charge any sort of wallet fee for transferring or storing digital assets.

How Open Source mitigates Hardware Obsolescence

Since day one, everything about Trezor hardware wallets has been open source. The software can be downloaded, shared, cloned, modified, and stored in every computer in the world without triggering any legal consequences.

The devices themselves are open source to the point that official DIY guides exist for the purpose of enabling anyone to build their own hardware wallet. And to accomplish this feat, you can use affordable, common and general-purpose parts that are easy to find and verify.

Why is Trezor doing this instead of applying for patents? First of all, it’s because the founders believe in the power of open source and also have backgrounds in Linux development. If anyone can contribute by suggesting improvements and even by launching competing products, the hardware and software designs become stronger. Everything gets tested by a greater number of experts, and this results in more feedback that only strengthens the security.

Speaking of security, Trezor always believed in offering a product that can prove it does what it claims to do. How can anyone trust in something that can’t be verified by anyone, with the exception of the manufacturers? Would anyone knowingly install a security camera whose live feed and storage can potentially leak data? Would you secure your house with a lock that nobody knows how to fix or break, and might as well lock you out, too? There’s a lot of value in universal standards whose limitations are known and can be supplemented in other ways that don’t add unnecessary sophistication.

Now let’s get back to the issue of hardware obsolescence. What happens if Trezor somehow goes out of business and you aren’t able to buy any more hardware wallets? Well, the hardware schematics will always be there so you can build your own device.

What happens if the USB ports become just as obsolete as Firewire and PS/2? To fix the connectivity issue according to the latest technologies, any engineer can modify the external port while preserving the rest of the schematic.

If the hardware were to disappear for various reasons, the free open-source software will exist for as long as the internet is still around and people are willing to host data from their computers. You will never need anyone’s license or permission to use it, modify it, and share it around.

Trezor’s mix of open source hardware and software removes the need for blind trust and nurtures security innovation. Just like Bitcoin, the code is completely open source, has been verified by thousands of security experts, and has been subjected to many forks and upgrades. The same spirit of transparency is also applicable to the hardware, as you can independently verify what every part does.

For various reasons, today’s Trezor hardware wallets may become obsolete in a few decades — just like VHS tapes or audio cassettes. Hopefully, Trezor will still be around to provide easy updates which allow you to switch from the old security standard to the new one. But, even if Trezor somehow ceases to exist, everything is still open source. There will always be someone who can maintain the software to make it compatible with the latest hardware, and the software itself can be operated on custom hardware and computers.

When you make something useful open source and let it spread in the wild, it’s pretty safe to say that it will probably never die. The recent youtube-dl software scandal shows how easily controversial code can be immediately preserved, in this case by preservationists at the Internet Archive, while rights groups defend the software’s legal applications in court.

When would you need to create your own Trezor?

The wallet seeds and Shamir backups that you create with your Trezor device can easily be recovered using open source software wallets such as Electrum. But it’s a bad idea to type the seed words or passphrase on your computer keyboard, as you may be exposed to malware. So owning a Trezor hardware wallet for input and verification purposes is essential for your Bitcoin security setup.

But what if you can no longer purchase a Trezor hardware wallet? It may be due to Trezor shutting down for some reason, or it may happen due to trade restrictions that won’t allow us to send you a new hardware wallet.

Let’s say that your government becomes authoritarian and bans Bitcoin. By extension, Trezor hardware wallets also become illegal. So what if the Trezor that you already own happens to break or you must destroy it during a government raid?

Well, you can still source the parts to build your own Trezor and recover your BIP39 or Shamir wallet. The good news is that the electronic components are general-purpose and fairly easy to find. To build your own Trezor Model T, you’re going to need a dev board, the STM32F429I micro controller unit (MCU), a capacitive screen, a bunch of USB and micro SD connectors (which are very common), and the patience to put it all together.

The parts are common and can be used for all sorts of DIY projects. So when you purchase them, you have some plausible deniability if your government turns against Bitcoin. You could even order some purposely-misleading parts to imply that you’re working on something else or have no idea what you’re doing.

After you assemble the parts and build your own Trezor hardware wallet, it’s time to add the most important part: the software. To protect your privacy, you should try to use the Tor browser for all of your Bitcoin interactions. So clone or fork our code from GitHub, make sure that your connection is safe and preferably store the files in a computer that’s not connected to the internet (or an external hard drive that you unplug when your computer is offline). The Trezor Suite wallet works natively with Tor so you can mask your connection with a single click.

What happens if SatoshiLabs goes out of business?

In the event of something happening to SatoshiLabs, there will definitely be open source coders who maintain the software for the community. So all you would have to do is acquire the parts — the code is distributed and available in enough versions to help you create the secure device that you need in this era of mandatory security.

Hardware obsolescence may affect the majority of your electronic devices, but as a transparency-first security company, Trezor is exempt from the consequences. The hardware wallets can easily receive upgrades to the latest connection port specifications, and the code will always exist for you to download and build your own device. Thanks to our open source ethos, accessible Bitcoin security is here to stay.

Wallet

This is probably one of the most used terms you will see in the cryptocurrency world. While it may seem quite straight-forward, confusion can arise when the term is used in a wrong context. Let’s have a closer look at what we mean by the word “wallet”.

Compare your Trezor with the wallet that you carry with you on a daily basis. In your wallet, you may have debit cards to different bank accounts, credit cards, personal documents, fiat bills, maybe even different currencies. The wallet in your Trezor is similar — there are separate pouches for different currencies: one for Bitcoin, one for Ethereum, also one for your U2F identity, etc. Everything you need is in one wallet.

Sounds a bit like the Recovery Seed described in our previous article, doesn’t it? Each seed generates only one wallet, and your Trezor lets you manage its contents. Therefore, under normal circumstances*, you have exactly one wallet “in” your Trezor.

This wallet is further subdivided into currency-specific wallets, such as your Bitcoin wallet, Ethereum wallet (incl. ERC-20 tokens), Litecoin wallet, Zcash wallet, and so on. All are derived from the same seed, but managed separately for better orientation.

This chart shows how each cryptocurrency you use is derived from the same seed. Using a passphrase would create a new set of wallets completely unrelated to the ones above.

Accounts

Unlike a wallet, of which you only have one per seed, you can have multiple separate accounts for each currency. Compare this to your bank accounts — you might have a Checking account and a Savings account. As they are separate accounts, they are completely independent, save from the fact that they are generated from the same seed. Account A does not see what is in Account B, etc.

Trezor Suite, the desktop and web interface for your hardware wallet allows up to 10 accounts of a single type per currency per wallet. This is a practical limitation, as it decreases the load on our servers.

Bitcoin has several account types reflecting technological changes over time. Taproot P2TR, SegWit P2WPKH, Legacy SegWit P2SH-P2WPKH and Legacy P2PKH Account types are each counted as a single account type, and therefore 10 of each can be used at once.