Another Reason Why You Should Attach Yer Browser Wallets to a Hardware Wallet (A story)

If you've got any crypto wallets installed in your Browser (such as MentaMask), I thoroughly recommend linking them to a hardware wallet such as a Trezor or a Ledger (you might not have a choice which, depending on the wallet).

By doing so you are effectively moving control of ALL the data in that wallet (i.e. all your tokens, crypto tokens are just DATA after all!) to that hardware wallet.

Once you've made the connection, then any future transactions you authorise in (for example) MetaMask) you will also have to authorise via your Hardware wallet (for example your Trezor).

So for me to make a MetaMask Transaction I now need to physically attach my Trezor to my machine to authorise it (I also need Trezor Suite installed to facilitate the communication between the two).

I literally need to hardwire the device into my machine and push buttons on it to confirm any moving or selling or pooling or unpooling of assets.

Probably the most obvious reason for having this second layer of security on your Browser wallet is that it will prevent hacks - IF you accidentally give permission to another address to access your funds (which you may have done without realising it if you've ever tried claiming one of of those magical tokens you've been airdropped that are worth $$$thousands$$$) then it may well have permission but it won't be able to actually move them anywhere else because to do so would require another verification via the hardware wallet that it doesn't have access to.

But that's not the only reason... it's much less hassle to reinstall browser wallets via a hardware wallet compared to using your damned keys to install them...,

The following little story is how I learned this the hard way!

On messing up my Brave Browser and Deleting all its Data...

My main computer is a MacBook Air - and as you may or may not know these come with a limited amount of memory - 128GB - which is a bit crap but it is what it is.

I've had this machine for almost four years now and the Hard Drive has been floating around full for the last year at least.

I recently wanted to do a system upgrade which required me to free up about 15GB of storage, and so I decided to tackle the dreaded 'other' section of the Mac's storage....

This is a bloody annoying feature of the MAC - you can use the internal clean up software to clean most files and applications you aren't using or that are very large, but you have to clean up 'other' manually.

This time last week I had '50GB' of storage in other which is just silly.

After a quick online search I found out the route I needed to go access this - one folder with about 30 sub folders in - none of which I could find out the size of without going into each individual file.

Bloody annoying.

Still, after 30 minutes I'd managed to get through the lot and delete various individual files (you could get size data on those) one of which was this massive Brave support folder - 2GB.

So I just hit delete.

Then of course, back on Brave and it's like a fresh install - no crypto wallets.

I'd lost....

• MetaMask
• Yoroi (Cardano)
• DEFI WALLET
• Kepler (Cosmos)
• TerraStation (Oops!)

So FIVE wallets in all.

Now obviously I've got my keys for all of these backed up - but they're in pretty obscure locations and not clearly labelled as to what they are (deliberately!) so it took me a while to re-install all of the last four which ARE NOT LINKED TO HARDWARE WALLETS.

In fact with Kepler I had a real bloody nightmare - it took me 2 hours of digging to find the back ups for that (I could of course store this better!)

And then it's entering in all of those seed phrases manually which takes time.

Compare this to MetaMask which is linked to my Trezor - all I had to do there was reinstall it, click the 'connect to hardware wallet' button, plop in the Trezor, click a few confirmations and there you go: three wallets back up and running within about 30 seconds.

The downside is I have to go back and add in all the damned custom tokens, but at least the wallets are operational with rapid effect.

So in short... connect yer browser wallets to hardware, it'll make your life a lot easier if yer browser fucks up!