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Did you know that you can only watch so many Jerry Banfield videos about SteemIt on YouTube™ before you just have to come be part of the SteemIt community? It's true!

Golly. His excitement alone is enough for everyone perhaps, eh? :p

Wow!

Are we all excited about crypto or what? I know I am! Perhaps a little too excited for my own good? But that's a whole other story.

Lately I've been getting into mining, as well as a little cautious trading and have accumulated enough crypto to think about taking its security more seriously.

Recent Long Term and Security Realizations

When I found about about Bitcoin's big pump over the past few months (having taken big losses and hid under a rock for a couple years!) I went hunting through old exchange and PC wallets -- even resurrecting an old hard disk from the junk drawer -- to eventually find about US$150 worth of BTC the new values! Then the BTC thing happened. WHAAAT?! Cool!

Retrieving and consolidating all those old wallets with pennies here and there into a single account took me the best part of a day! Flash drives, old backups, old PCs collecting dust in the garage. The largest amount I found in any single wallet was sub $2, at the rates from yesteryear. LOL

Time to Get Real

That all got me thinking; Imagine if the few hundred I have in accounts today -- assuming I don't just lose the keys ... close call! -- sat around for another couple years? I wake up one day and realise I could have $10,000 ... if only I had the keys? HELL NO! :p

Having finally woken up and crawled out from under that rock, the first thing I did was to get pencil and paper and write down my new private keys. I was delighted to learn that some modern wallets now use convenient, "seed words", from which multiple coin wallets are derived. Transferring what little I had into such accounts made the paper backup a comparative walk in the park. WIN!

Meh. BORING! :p

But you know ... I'm a techno geek and while paper is by far the most secure long term storage medium for crypto keys imo, it's also kinda boring!

What about day-to-day security? It's not like I want to store those keys on a PC and I certainly don't want to have to open my fire safe every time I want to send a coin somewhere.

Knowing how easy it is to crack a Windows computer or coerce access to same via a multitude of online methods -- heaven forbid! -- does nothing to increase my trust in personal computers for storing my fortune in coins. Apple mobile devices might be a bunch more secure than most. But how can one be sure? It would be naive to think we could trust ANY device with an active Internet connection, connected to dozens of services in any given day, right? Riiiight?!

Too Dramatic?

Well, it's no big deal today, when there's just a few coins kicking around in a mobile wallet. But life has taught me -- in no uncertain terms and sadly, more than once -- that one does well to start out as one intends to proceed. If I don't have decent security systems in place TODAY, then the day after I win a lottery next year, I could find myself feeling very sorry for myself, right?! Better to be safe than sorry, as they say.

But how?

Hardware Wallets

Then I learned about Hardware Wallets. Where have you been all my life! (And why didn't I think of that?!)

At first, it wasn't obvious how yet another electronic device could really be that more secure -- especially if it has to be plugged into an online computer to even work.

After doing some long overdue study into how private keys are actually made and in particular, how transaction signing works, it all became clear. Hardware wallets are the THE only way to secure daily transacting accounts, with any level of convenience, beyond any amount I could stand to lose -- which frankly, should not be even a single Satoshi, in principal. [Ed. Dang. I thought he was gonna break a record for longest sentence there. Oh well.]

Which One? How to buy?

I first discovered the Trezor v1.1 Hardware Wallet. The following image is clipped from the website, http://trezor.io

But when I went to buy one at the time, it turned out that everywhere I tried was either out of stock or had shipping costs more than the device itself, to my little part of the world. That recent BTC price action surely had something to do with it. Dangit!

Apparently, the device was crowdfunded. But to this day, I cannot discover where. Did it all only happen on Reddit?

Open Source!

Then I realized that the Trezor was open source -- firmware and hardware design, right down to STLs for the case itself. So not out of options yet! ;-)

Making my own Trezor Hardware Wallet

It just so happens that I know a thing or two about making electronic wizardry. (I get a warm fuzzy feeling every time I say that! :p) So, I figured I'd just have to leverage the wonderful open source files and make my own.

Starting Out

Initially, I intended to get a development board for the STM32F205 microcontroller chip along with a compatible and bread-boardable I2C OLED display -- as used in the Trezor 1.x designs.

However, if I went that route, I'd end up paying considerably more in hardware alone,plus the build time, than just waiting for a Trezor retailer to get some stock. It would still be fun ... but I decided to skip that stage and just go directly to the finished product, on the final circuit board.

Seeed Studio for the Win

I absolutely love Seeed Studio's PCB prototyping service, which they call Fusion PCB/PCBA! In my experience they have the fastest turnaround and western facing shipping of any of the others I've tried over the years. Coupled with online instant pricing, including live Gerber view and I reckon y'just can't go wrong.

All I had to do was load the PCB design files into a free version of Autodesk™ Eagle (was CADSOFT) which I found here and have Eagle output Gerber files for Seeed's PCB factory.

PCBs from Seeed in just 9 Days!

Here they are ...

Nine days and seven hours from the time I confirmed the order online (US$4.90 for ten boards!) to arrive on my doorstep -- some 12,000Kms south east from their factory (DHL $26 -- 5x the cost of the boards themselves but still CHEAP!) I just can't ask for more than that.

Waiting for Parts

I ordered the electronics parts from Element14. Had to find the pushbutton switches on AliExpress again. Really surprised that Element14 doesn't stock anything quite like these.

So, now I have to wait a couple weeks for everything to trickle in, so I can begin soldering up the boards.

Total Cost to Date

I'm at about US$80 all up up so far -- enough to build two Trezor v1.1s. Granted, I've invested countless hours over many years just honing the skills required to be able to build the things myself. Funny how I really do believe that anyone could do this, though! I know. Crazy. Impossible for most, eh? But it's really not. All you need is time and practice.

Today, there's probably no better place to start than with a cheap Arduino clone starter kit from Ali'. Why not jump in? (I don't support the so-called "official" Arduino folks, because it appears they actually all but stole the whole idea of the original creator, giving no due credit!! Look it up!)

To Be Continued ...

That's all for this installment. Catch you down the track, when the component arrive and I get some solder station time!

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P.S: By way of disclosure, for the more discerning reader; I have no idea if the AliExpress links above come back to me in any way. I don't think so. There's no referral codes or whatever that I can see. shrug I'm just trying to have fun! :-)