My Hardware Wallets Arrive

I recently purchased 2 Hardware Wallets: A Ledger Nano S and a Trezor.

The Trezor package arrived with a holographic factory seal on its top and bottom. The seal tore away but the box itself is fortified with superglue. My bare hands couldn’t disengage the flaps from the box. I used a kitchen knife and scissors to butcher the cardboard and found inside: the Trezor Hardware Wallet device (I bought  a white one), a keychain lanyard, a Micro USB adapter cord, 4 stickers, an instruction card and 2 Recovery Seed cards.
The Ledger Nano S package is stylish, minimalist like an iPhone. I was shocked to see it HAD NO SECURITY SEAL. If I bought this from Amazon.com, I would send it back, but I bought it straight from the factory in France. Maybe only wallets sent to resellers get the security seal? I felt uneasy.

Opening the Nano S package was much easier than Trezor’s. The Nano S box top smoothly lifted off, revealing its contents: the Nano S device, a short USB cable, a lanyard, a keychain, and “instruction booklet”.
The Ledger Nano S “instruction booklet” is a cardboard envelope with 3 tiny cue cards. The first card says “Did You Notice? There is no anti-tampering sticker on this box.”

Uh, yeah, I did notice, thanks for the anxiety attack. The card continues to explain “A cryptographic mechanism checks the integrity of your ledger device’s internal software each time it is powered on. The Secure Element chip prevents any interception or physical replacement attempt. ledger devices are engineered to be tamper proof.” Honestly, if I bought this from Amazon, I would suspect the seller added it to explain the unsealed box, scheming to steal my coins on a tampered device. But it shipped straight from the factory, so I have to believe it’s legit. So the first lesson is: You CAN safely buy the Ledger Nano S from Amazon and save yourself the overseas shipping cost.

The second card instructs how to configure the device, but all it says is “go to start.ledgerwallet.com and follow the instructions to configure your device”. So the second lesson is: If you buy a Ledger Nano S on Amazon, don’t pay more for the (useless) instruction booklet.

The third card is the Recovery Sheet which has 24 blank lines to write your series of recovery words. I figure this will make more sense when I set up my device and move my Bitcoin to it. This is the next thing on my To-Do list.