Buy a Trezor Model T, Get a Free Trezor One [Affiliate Ad]

Trezor is responsible for designing the world’s first Bitcoin hardware wallet, and it’s thanks to their open source contributions that this niche of coin security has expanded and flourished.

The following article presents a limited-time offer for Trezor’s hardware wallets, which marks the celebration of the Trezor One’s 6th birthday. In a nutshell, purchasing a Trezor Model T between the 21st of July (starting a midnight, CET) and the 23rd of July (ending at 9 AM CET) will get you a free Trezor One. Please refer to a specialized website to understand how that relates to your time zone (or do the math yourself).

This way, you don’t have to think about which device is right for your needs: you buy the Model T and you get the other model too.

Why Trezor?

Back in 2014, Satoshi Labs has introduced to the world the Trezor One: a simple device which aims to protect your bitcoins from infected computers. According to co-inventor Slush, the hardware wallet was aimed to help him manage his BTC at SlushPool.

6 years later, the Trezor One is still the benchmark for security and the standard from which every other hardware wallet starts developing. Satoshi Labs also open sources all of their software, so you shouldn’t be surprised to discover that lots of other hardware wallet developers use their code.

As described by Slush in S4 E8 of the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, hardware always lags behind software and tends to get inefficient in time. So the design philosophy of Trezor isn’t to release a new model every year to fix some security flaws (as other manufacturers tend to do), but to focus on developing software updates for the existing devices.

This is also why the Trezor One is still being manufactured and sold 6 years later its launch: it received many firmware updates and has been constantly fixed after vulnerabilities were discovered. While other manufacturers focus on the hardware part and chase physical security at the expense of frequently putting out new products, Trezor focuses on code.

Also, it should be explained what Trezor is not trying to do (at least at this point): physical security.

The lack of a secure element chip for physical security is addressed through the passphrase, the Shamir backup, and the multisig setups.

It’s not that Trezor don’t want to attain physical security (as a matter of fact, they are starting a project named Tropic Square to address the issue in their trademark open-source manner). Instead, they don’t want to compromise on the open-source auditability and transparency just to follow the security trend that Ledger have started.

You shill, muh Coldcard

Let me stop you right there are explain why I’m promoting Trezor. And no, this is not a paid post – I’ve joined the affiliate program of Trezor, and will only make money out of this if people actually buy their Model T in the next couple of days after clicking my link.

But while recording season 4 of the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast, I was surprised to discover that the two security experts (Lazy Ninja and Peter Todd) have expressed similar opinions about security: the best security is not the one that tries to cover every possible threat, but the one that’s limited and honest about its limitations.

It’s the reason why I have chosen to promote Trezor (they’re honest about who they are and what they’re doing), and I don’t know about you but I’d rather trust a developer and a hardware wallet hacker than a founder and his company’s marketing department.

“And if I am going to tell them to go get a hardware wallet, frankly I’d actually trust Trezor more because they do have a design that is based on more off-the-shelf chips than other people do. The problem with something like the Ledger is — to get all these fancy security chips — you have to go sign NDAs and then people can’t easily reverse engineer your devices and figure out if they’re actually doing what they should be doing. You’re actually putting much more trust into the manufacturer than you are on a Trezor, or let alone a phone” – Peter Todd

“I actually use a Trezor Model T. I had actually just upgraded from my Trezor One to that and now it’s sort of funny… people will be like ‘Well, you know, that doesn’t have the secure element that you like so much’ and stuff like that. And it is actually a security negative to that device to not have a secure element. And there are a number of attacks that are possible because of that. But in my case I’m valuing the screen size and ease of use from that perspective as being more important than the secure element. Because in general, I don’t actually take my hardware out of my house and I don’t actually store my funds on the hardware wallet most of the time. Usually everything’s in cold storage and the hardware wallet is just sort of storing intermediate levels of funds. So in my case, yeah, the Trezor Model T was the best one for me.” – Lazy Ninja

But wait, you work for Trezor!

Yes, as a freelancer who writes a blog post on the Trezor blog every couple of weeks. I’m free to talk about anything, I’m free to criticize or praise any product, I have no skin in the game at this point.

There are three reasons why I’ve written this article:

1. To raise awareness about this promotion (if you’re anything like me and collect hardware wallets, this is a good opportunity to expand your collection);
2. To explain what Trezor is all about (they’re not great at marketing their own products on Twitter and get a lot of undeserved hate while being the ones who create the code that everyone else forks for their “cooler” products);
3. To hopefully make some money from affiliate links.

So if you’d like to help me make some money, then please use my link.

If you’d rather make a donation to help me keep on writing, recording podcasts, and doing videos, then use this address: 3Hu32u76dDau752kjeH94e94JCU2fsMFoz

If you hate me for expressing a view which echoes the arguments of security professionals with a reputation and skin in the game, then so be it. Express it in the comments, cancel me on Twitter and do whatever makes you feel better about your own existence.