1. Introduction

1.2. Importance of mining in the Bitcoin network The process and concept of Bitcoin mining were initially introduced as a means of allowing more Bitcoins to enter the market, with the rate of new coin creation set to halve every 4 years. However, the act of mining has now become critical to the function of the Bitcoin network due to the increased block difficulty levels. Miners who successfully add a block to the chain will not only receive a monetary reward but will also enable another user who has made a Bitcoin transaction to receive a “new” or “unspent” Bitcoin to actually spend. This is achieved through the incremental attribute which is added to each transaction and the recent block chain confirmation. Without the added block to confirm the original transaction, the recipient would still be able to spend that Bitcoin, rendering his transaction invalid.

1.1. What is Bitcoin mining? Bitcoin mining is the process of verifying and adding transaction records to the public Bitcoin ledger. This ledger is maintained through a series of blocks, where each block contains a list of confirmations for an increasing number of transactions. Miners race to solve a mathematical function, which will determine the next block in the chain. The first to solve this function will have their block added to the chain, and in doing so, they will receive a reward of newly minted Bitcoins as well as any transaction fees that have been included in the block. This combination of newly minted coins and transaction fees provides an incentive for individuals to mine.

1.1. What is Bitcoin mining?

When it comes to bitcoin mining, it can be thought of as the same as gold mining, except it takes place in the digital world. The mining process begins by solving a difficult problem (computational work) that is used to secure the blockchain and in doing so, it rewards the miners with a few bitcoins and transaction fees. The process of solving the problem is what the miners do, is what gives value to the coins and is known as proof-of-work. By mining historically, the gold would be traded with a currency delivered by the person who received it, and this led to placing value on the currency. In the same sense, exchanging currency for the reward of the digital work and proof-of-work adds value to the digital currency that was received.

An analogy can be made to gold mining, as when it comes to mining bitcoin, the same mining principle applies. In gold mining, gold is extracted from the earth and separated from other impurities, often using the gold pan and the newly extracted gold is then refined with a liquid solution using other methods to separate the unwanted minerals from the gold. Neither method is superior to the other, and it is a matter of preference to which method to use. Some people prefer to mine by extracting ore from the earth and separating the gold, while others use a pan that takes much less time and is also less complex.

Bitcoin mining is the process by which transactions are verified and added to the public ledger, known as the blockchain, and also the means through which new bitcoins are released. Anyone with access to the internet and suitable hardware can participate in mining. The mining process involves compiling recent transactions into blocks and trying to solve a computationally difficult puzzle. The participant who first solves the puzzle gets to place the next block on the blockchain and claim the rewards. The rewards, which incentivize mining, are both the transaction fees associated with the transactions compiled in the block as well as newly released bitcoin.

1.2. Importance of mining in the Bitcoin network

Now if an attacker were to try and double spend money that he had just used to buy something in the real world, say he had tried to buy a TV for 1 BTC. He would include a transaction to send the same 1 BTC to himself instead of sending it to the merchant. In order to have a decent chance of the transaction sending the 1 BTC to the merchant included in a block, he would need to solve a puzzle. Realistically, the merchant is going to wait for the transaction to be securely included in a block before handing over the product, and the merchant is not likely to release the TV unless the transaction is included in a block, so to save his money, the merchant could start mining to try and extend the block containing the transaction to a block containing a puzzle solution. This, of course, will increase the demand for mining.

When a transaction is made, it goes into a pool of pending transactions. Each transaction has a puzzle attached to it. This puzzle should take around 10 minutes to solve, and the solution is to include the transaction in a block. By adjusting the difficulty of the puzzle, the network can control how long it would take for a group of intelligent and rational actors to solve all the puzzles, and assuming that a majority does not have more than half the total computational power, the puzzles are the closest thing to having a ‘democratic vote’ on which transactions should be included.

The first point to note is that Bitcoin mining provides a way to secure the entire Bitcoin network. By verifying transactions, miners are helping to prevent ‘double-spending’ attacks. Because these attacks are such a threat to all digital forms of money, the Bitcoin Protocol has been designed to make these attacks unprofitable. How this is done is worth some further explanation.

Let us now talk about the most relevant implications that Bitcoin mining has for the Bitcoin network. This is the area in which mining and the blockchain are inextricably linked and which has implications for the broader sector of use.

1.3. Mining at home vs. mining in data centers

GPU miners can still mine other altcoins using their graphics cards, that are still mostly mined with computers and not ASICs. If they want to remain in the Bitcoin network, they could try to join mining pools, that are groups of miners that work together to find blocks. Upon finding a block, the reward is distributed among the members of the group proportional to the amount of work they put in. This would increase their chances of receiving a block reward, but still, it may not be much.

Mining at home has been more of a hobby in the early years of Bitcoin. You could find a block using your computer’s CPU and nobody else could mine at the same time. The difficulty was low, the reward was high, and the network was small. Those days are well behind us and since then, mining at home has become much more difficult to be profitable. With the rise of ASIC miners, Bitcoin’s difficulty has increased so much that it’s not worth mining with anything but the most efficient miners. The cost of electricity plays a huge role in the profitability of mining.

Bitcoin mining was designed to be profitable enough to make it worth the effort of mining for miners and to secure the network. This makes the Bitcoin network much more efficient and decentralized than that of other miners. There is adequate room for both types of mining in the network, which is still profitable.

2. Getting Started with Bitcoin Mining at Home

To get started with bitcoin mining at home, you will need the right equipment. Due to the competitive nature of bitcoin mining in today’s world, it is essential that you join a pool. Pools are collections of miners working together to mine bitcoins and are a way many miners who are unable to generate a block on their own make a steady income. While the pool has a much larger chance of solving a block and winning the reward, that reward will be split between all the members of the pool according to the amount of work incurred to find it. It is always suggested to join a pool, as the chances of you successfully mining a block on your own are extremely low. At a minimum, you should have a 2.5–3.0 GHz dual-core processor, 2GB of RAM (although 4GB is recommended), a decent internet connection, and about 5GB of free disk space. High-end GPUs (graphics processing units) are often the best for mining, and it is a good idea to pick up a GPU that is designed for gaming. When purchasing the GPUs, look at the processing power; this is more important than video RAM. An example of a good GPU for the price would be the ATI Radeon HD 5850. These have an MHash of 300 or more and can be used to mine bitcoins at 400 MHash or more.

2.1. Hardware requirements for home mining

FPGA and ASIC Mining The idea behind this is to develop hardware and sell it to miners to replace the current technology. The first successful development was FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). FPGA is an integrated circuit designed to be configured by the customer after manufacturing. What this essentially means is that you could buy lower-cost FPGA to configure to mine bitcoins. This method is fairly obsolete today as it increases power consumption on mining rigs. Today we have more efficient hardware known as ASIC (Application-specific integrated circuit). This was the end to most people’s mining careers, and ASIC was the first to make it unprofitable to mine coins. The market is made for a specific task to generate coins, and the best part is that its energy consumption is very low. Unfortunately, costs for this hardware are fairly high, and most of the modern variations just keep getting better, making it hard to stay in the game. Although it’s not profitable to most these days, it was part of mining history and is still one of the defining factors in past coins lost out there today.

GPU Mining When CPU mining was noticed, people were using more than one computer to mine bitcoins and it wasn’t long before they realized that graphics cards were better at mining. This is because graphics cards are designed to handle complex 3D operations that CPUs are not designed for because it would take too long to solve algorithms. A programmer known as “ArtForz” worked out a way to utilize GPUs to do mining. Using code is a bit technical so I won’t go into detail, but it was able to generate around 700 MH/s (Mega Hashes per Second) for a fairly low price. The time was becoming a competitive marketplace until the first large mining farm was developed in China. This can be debated, but it was estimated that this farm was able to pull out 50% of the entire network mining power. This, in turn, made CPU/GPU mining unprofitable. Today, large farms located mainly in China are known to pull out 80% of the network hash rate. The energy requirement was low, and if you had enough GPUs, you could still generate some profit.

CPU Mining When Bitcoin was first introduced, people could mine 50 coins every 10 minutes on their laptops. The competition was so small that a computer was able to produce coins fairly rapidly. As more bitcoins entered the network, it became more complex and harder to generate bitcoins. The idea behind CPU mining is to use a computer’s processing power to generate a block in the blockchain. The CPU would be used to solve algorithms for the blockchain and in return, you could get a few bitcoins. Over time, people started to notice that graphic cards were able to solve algorithms quicker than regular CPUs. This in itself was a new breakthrough and it will lead us into the next stage.

The following paragraphs are taken from the section “2.1 Hardware requirements for home mining” from the essay entitled “Mining Bitcoin at home”.

2.2. Software options for mining at home

Summarizing, you should at least consider mining for fun, as it is still possible to make some extra cash, but it does require an efficient set up with high-end hardware, proven energy efficiency, and cost-effective property requirements. You should be aiming to make the value of electricity used less than the amount of BTC you will be earning. You must consider the increasing difficulty over the next few months as it will become harder to make a profit, being prepared for the future by looking into ASIC hardware. Finally, you must remember to declare any capital gains to avoid illegal tax evasion. It is up to you to decide if this venture is worthwhile for you as an individual.

The art of mining Bitcoin at home with efficient hardware and software is a simple and effective way to make some extra cash. It mainly involves using your home computer to mine blocks on the network. In order to do this, the software which utilizes the hardware resources to perform the mathematical calculations which give value to the network essentially carries out what is known as CPU and/or GPU mining. The software itself is free but there is a 1% commission on whatever profits you make, which goes to the creator of the software. An example of high-quality software would be RPCminer or Phoenix 2. These are both simple programs that do not require any elaborate set-up or knowledge and are user-friendly. They are also both faster than CPU mining, which is worthwhile and efficient. A more complex way to set up your software for mining is to run a program such as DiabloMiner on your GPU and PBLBM on your CPU. This way, you can utilize GPU efficiency for GPU and CPU mining to gain maximum profit. A tutorial on how to mine using your home computer using these programs will be released at a later date.

2.3. Setting up a mining rig at home

With the wide variety of companies out there developing mining software and miners, it is critical that you ensure that your rig’s software is up-to-date. This means going onto the company site and checking for updates as often as possible. Using outdated software will cause your rig to sit there in a non-productive state. Just because your rig is idle, your monthly costs will still accumulate. This is often overlooked and can cause a lot of heartache. Updating your software ensures that you are always mining at the most profitable rates. Some mining software has become known to provide ridiculous claims of getting a certain amount of Bitcoins a day, only to find out that this is in fact far from the truth during the claims, so please do take note. It is generally best to use it on the default setting and adjust accordingly. Always avoid joining a group of miners sharing income, as this is always a gamble as to whether the group will stay together and if the administrators provide truthful information. This would lead to an entire new topic of discussion, but for the time being, do wait for a future article on the subject. As of this moment, there are only a few mining pools that support full pay-per-share, no-fee, and no-commission-based systems. With that said, happy mining, and stay tuned for updated information.

2.4. Choosing the right mining pool

Payout is the most obvious factor when deciding on a pool. Pool owners pool a certain percentage of fees from your payout to cover their costs, and they also usually determine when you can receive a payout. Payouts can either be a set amount per block found or a percentage of the coins from each block. Please bear in mind that using a large pool is not always better than using a small one. The pool’s hashrate will determine the number of small payments you can receive. If the pool has a considerably high hashrate, it may take a very long time to see a return on your investment, and the smaller pools have a higher chance of finding blocks—a catch 22 for the newcomer.

Choosing the right mining pool can be a daunting task. There are many factors involved when deciding on a pool. Some may consider the payout, others may pool their resources with large organizations, while others may find solace in the fact that the pool they choose may not be pulling hairs to cover server costs.

3. Challenges and Considerations

As with anything, there are advantages and disadvantages to home mining. The advantages include being your own boss, working in your own time, no rush or clocking in and out, no heavy lifting physically or mentally, no colleagues to deal with, and you get to partake in this wonderful crypto-capitalist free-for-all that is the economy of internet 2.0. Oh, and you can also make a profit. Sounds great, right? However, the disadvantages far outweigh this if you are serious about power. This is due to the high cost of electricity and the hardware and software are too slow. It would only be advantageous for the solo miner if he mines on a very small scale and is willing to wait a long time to make a profit.

Desktop PCs are now powerful enough to run advanced applications used for Bitcoin mining. This means that it is becoming ever more competitive to actually make any money through Bitcoin mining. Mining is an important and integral part of Bitcoin that ensures fairness while keeping the Bitcoin network stable, safe, and secure. Currently, it is the only way to secure new bitcoins being issued. Step back a moment. When you mine coins, you are basically auditing at the same time, in the hopes of receiving a reward for solving the mathematical problems. In essence, you are providing an external service in auditing and increasing the security of the transaction.

3.1. Energy consumption and cost considerations

So that’s a fairly generic piece of advice to people on how they should consider energy costs in relation to mining, but without hard numbers or ideas of how to manage them. For those looking to determine the specific energy consumption of their system, there is a hard way and an easy way. The easiest way is to find a miner from the p2pool bitcoin nodes or from the mining pool subforum, and go check out the threads for various different miners. You can then ask them for their hash rate and system specs, and figure that the power consumption of the GPU will be 5x its typical power consumption listed on hardware review sites, which will give 10.6 million hashes per joule. This is a good estimation of power consumption relative to hash rate. The hard way to determine power consumption is to measure the power consumption of your PC at the wall with a device such as the killawatt, then run some mining and do some calculations based on your system’s power consumption while idle and the power consumption of your GPU while running games and such.

There are technical aspects of Bitcoin mining that must be considered, and one of these is the energy cost of mining. Bitcoin mining is an intensive process that strains your CPU and GPU alike, to the point of general system use becoming somewhat unfeasible. So, the specific energy consumption rate of your system is very important to how much you need to invest into the hardware for your system to perform optimally and recoup the investment. If the initial investment into the system is high, but so is the energy cost, this will greatly increase the time it takes to break even and start profiting. Given that at the very earliest, bitcoin mining can be thought of as a high-risk investment, this means you want to minimize costs as much as possible to maximize the time it takes to break even and begin profiting. This will also reduce your risk of depression and anger when you realize you probably won’t get your money back on building a gaming PC and turning it into a mining rig.

3.2. Dealing with heat and noise from mining equipment

The primary heating problem is usually resolved by most miners by running a simple desk fan that directs cool air onto the surface of the ASIC miners. If heat dissipation remains an issue, it is advised to ensure that the room housing the mining hardware has sufficient ventilation. This can be achieved using an air extractor or a standalone air-conditioning unit. Isolating the room mining hardware is in is another effective method to reduce internal household heating. It may also be worth considering a portable evaporative air cooler. They are great for cooling air in arid environments; however, are less effective in humid regions. The cooling efficiency of an air-conditioning or cooling system can also be improved by simply starting the systems at night when outside temperatures are lower. High power consumption and heat generation are not only issues for the miner but also for those in warmer climates, where the extra heat can result in a greater expense on air conditioning or a reduced ASIC lifespan due to the increased room temperature. Cost efficiency in the form of less power consumption and dissipated heat for the same hash rate can be achieved in time with more energy-efficient ASICs.

3.3. Network and internet requirements for home mining

For mining, network and internet bandwidth are very important. In order to see any bitcoins from a single S5, you will need to join a pool. The odds of you finding a block alone are very slim, so the idea is to work together with other miners. Your probability of finding a block therefore is increased, as are your potential earnings. The S5 is also a good platform to experiment with hardware and firmware. Altering the clock speed and voltage reduces power consumption and cost but will increase hash rate; the S5 will produce around 0.33 TH/s at a clock rate of 366. This concludes the hardware setup section. For example, some rogue developers have threatened to release software that could hard-fork the network, which would likely result in tremendous financial damage. Therefore, it is your duty to make sure that any Bitcoin mining power you direct to a mining pool does not attempt to enforce network consensus rules you disagree with. SPV Mining / Old Seed Nodes? If you are mining using a pool, the estimated expected Bitcoin earnings can vary greatly depending on the pool’s efficiency, stale/reject/orphan rate, and fees. If you are mining solo, the estimated expected Bitcoin earnings can vary greatly depending on your luck and stale/reject/orphan rate.

3.4. Security risks and precautions

To reduce this risk, users should always store their coins in an encrypted wallet and back it up using correct backup procedures, storing backup data in an off-site location. The only coins that the user should store, especially long-term, are the ones which they would have to spend time mining again. In practice, this means that coins should only be mined directly to the wallet, which is stored on the computer being used for mining. Finally, if mining on a less popular operating system, it is a good idea to minimize security risk by using a partition solely for the purpose of mining to reduce the attack surface.

First, the greatest potential security risk is if a user is using an old computer to mine and the mining software was installed from a disc or download link that is no longer available. In this scenario, a virus or malware could be activated, which could potentially result in an attacker attempting to steal the coins stored within the user’s wallet by gaining unauthorized access to the user’s wallet and transmitting the coins to another account which only the attacker has access to. This could also happen if there was a security flaw in the mining software, but it would most likely not be maliciously exploited unless the coins the software was attempting to mine are valuable.

Uninitialized security risks are among the most difficult aspects of mining at home. At first, most users would consider these to be acceptable risks since mining is not significantly different from running any other type of server software and there are a number of steps they can take to reduce these potential risks. The primary security risks are as follows:

3.5. Potential profitability and return on investment

In this grievous scenario, using the current bitcoin profitability calculator, a single device will solo mine, on average, 0.102 BTC in a year. At the least profitable static of one-month difficulty increase, the same device would produce only 0.0104 BTC per year.

Doing the sums Profitability calculators differ slightly and are only to be used as a rough guide, you may wish to spend more time considering the various calculators; current’s calculator is highly-regarded earning a small recommendation. A discarded desktop computer at home in the United States would add 175 million to the electricity costs per year when run 24/7 (lots of miners running an old PC). A more efficient PC excluding monitor will add about an additional 225 W. Using an online electricity cost calculator and average figures for consumption in the United States; 225 x 24 x 365 x 60/1000 = 394.2. at a cost of 12.5c per KWh 394.2 x 0.125 = 49.275

The unpredictable and often highly volatile nature of cryptocurrency values has made the difficulty of breaking even in direct USD profitability a coin mining a tough query to answer. This is due to the ever-changing nature of the Difficulty modifier and the BTC price, in particular. Additionally, worldwide electricity costs should be taken into account as miners largely operate 24/7; this incurs electricity costs which can escalate noticeably over time. Cost of electricity varies from country to country, region to region. With a rough approximation, the lower, yet generous difficulty static of 600, cost of electricity at $0.1/KW.

4. Best Practices and Tips for Successful Home Mining

When we start mining Bitcoin at home, we should do some best practices and tips for successful work. The major obstacles to the home miner will be obtaining electricity at a reasonable cost, considering the hardware and its electrical consumption. The home miner really doesn’t need to concern themselves too much with attacking the ‘scaling issue’. The fact remains that the home miner will never be profitable with their rig. The real money is in taking investment returns and purchasing the coins directly. If a user has their own funds or a small inheritance available to get started in mining, now would not be such a bad idea. Seeing the coins earned could be held and due to the risked initial capital not being too great, the miner could potentially end up on top. However, given the current ‘crunch’ of fiat spending money and new investors proceeding with caution towards the cryptocurrency space, it would nonetheless be a tough sell to recommend home mining.

4.1. Regular maintenance and monitoring of mining equipment

A warm and noisy equipment room. High heat equipment runs less efficiently, a power-saving mining mode will be implemented for hashboards that reach certain temperatures. Noise-Optimized mode will be made available for all miners with a firmware upgrade.

Mining equipment will use a lot of power. Ensure that you are using reliable power that won’t cut out, and it may be worth paying for an uninterruptible power supply. Simpler at this stage will just be to keep a close eye on the equipment’s performance. If you notice difficulty getting into the mining pool you’re using and any errors shown by the miner, then the likely cause is insufficient power. Withdrawing E3 from ETH.Hashpool due to insufficient power.

Dust is an indirect killer. It will cause components to fail and has been a major factor in computer and mining equipment failure. Prevent dust by: – Installing an air filter in all intakes and exhausts. – Not placing your system directly onto a carpeted floor. – Using canned air to blow dust off of all components roughly once per month. – Moving your system to a location with less dust.

Heat is a by-product of all electrical appliances, and for your computer, heat is enemy number one. If a computer reaches a high temperature and suddenly stops, this can cause damage to the hardware, but more commonly, it will cause the computer to run more slowly in order to reduce the temperature. If you’ve noticed, most computers have a maximum installation operating temperature of below 70 degrees Celsius. This really isn’t that high a temperature, and it’s very easy to exceed this under heavy load. Ideally, you should be looking to remove 100% of the heat produced from your computer. This means an ambient room temperature of 20 degrees Celsius (pretty cold), and heat removal from the air and the computer. By “the air,” I mean using air conditioning or an air exchanger. This isn’t too big a deal in winter months, but in summer, it can be a deal breaker in certain countries. By heat removal from the computer, I mean fans.

It is clear that in order to be profitable in any mining venture, you need to take care of your equipment well and maintain them accordingly. Bitcoin mining is no different, and although you cannot physically touch your digital mining equipment, it still requires regular maintenance to ensure its smooth running. It’s useful to break this down into separate areas and look at prevention of heat, dust, and electrical consumption. These are all important in ensuring the longevity of your system and maximizing mining time.

4.2. Strategies for maximizing mining efficiency

If you must mine using your computer, make sure it will only start mining when idle. If the miner is not aware of a particular block, it will usually just send out a request for that block to come as part of the normal data flow. Improving efficiency. To improve your efficiency, there are also companies that will let you order hardware to their warehouse and run the miners for you. You could also install Bitcoin Classic or any other full node implementation that includes bandwidth saving techniques. Bitcoin Classic is focused on providing the most efficient mining and relay software to the network and this method has proven to significantly reduce the resources required to participate. Another temporary incentive to run a full node client used to be that miners were paid with newly created coins. This feature was removed and the only way to get coins as a miner would be with already existing wallet coins or to use the Electrum client and claim the free transaction from time to time. Currently, this is the most difficult solution and it only provides very marginal benefits. One of Electrum’s additional features is that it supports hardware wallets like Trezor. With Trezor, your coins are held offline and a cold signing transaction is created on an online computer and sent to the net. Using a hardware wallet added a layer of security to your bitcoins elected to be worth the hassle for some miners. Finally, if you have to mine using a remote hosted ASIC, there are an array of security measures that can be implemented to protect your hardware and mined coins. This is not at all a comprehensive guide but a minimal knowledge of security will impact greatly on the potential success of a mining operation and prevent the many sad stories of broken-in rigs and forgotten wallets.

4.3. Staying updated with the latest mining trends and technologies

Bitcoin has been labelled as ‘digital gold’ and for a very good reason. Like gold, the bitcoin price has exploded in the last 10 years and with this price increase has come professionalization of the bitcoin mining industry. In the early years of bitcoin, anyone could mine with their home computer and they would have a high chance of successfully mining a block and being rewarded bitcoins. Those days are long gone, with bitcoin mining now only being feasible using expensive, specialized hardware made by companies like Bitmain. You can expect these trends to continue and more casual miners will have to make a cost/benefit analysis to determine if bitcoin mining is something they want to continue to do in the long term. With a few bitcoins, it’s possible that small-time casual miners could find themselves hosting or selling their hash rate with some sort of cloud mining operation.

The world of bitcoin mining is rapidly changing and there is a need to keep up-to-date with the latest trends and developments for successful bitcoin mining at home. It’s always good to know what trends might affect the price of the bitcoins you mine and what you can do to ensure long-term profits. It’s also good to know what the latest technologies are in both bitcoin and bitcoin mining as there could be some positive (or negative) changes that will affect your mining operation.

4.4. Managing and securing your mined Bitcoins

Hardware wallets are an effective alternative to standard wallets. Standard wallets use numerous private keys and addresses, which can get messy and be difficult to manage. A standard wallet necessitates using the whole blockchain and must be updated regularly, meaning that it is a good idea to learn how to generate and use a wallet that enables you to have a lot of control over your many private keys. A wallet with many private keys is difficult to secure properly. When bitcoin is stored in a standard wallet, the private keys depend on the client and they are stored on disk in an unencrypted clear text format. Bitcoin is easy to steal if the private keys are not encrypted. In the recent sweeping rush to Bitcoin, many users have failed to backup their private keys, so they will be unable to access their holdings. Electrum is a free software for which you can use to generate a seed; using this seed you can give someone else access to your wallet without giving has access to the private keys. Electrum uses servers which index the Bitcoin blockchain making it fast and light. Electrum is deterministic which means that all is needed to recover a wallet is its seed, even in the case it gets lost from a failure to backup. This means it’s a good idea to generate a standard wallet with this software and single writing down the seed on paper. Hardware wallets are purpose-built devices that store Bitcoin with much greater security than a standard wallet. A hardware wallet stores the user’s private keys on a secure hardware device, usually a USB and for extra security they are stored in an HSM. The device is locked with a PIN preventing unauthorized access, and if the device is stolen it could be protected with a BIP38 passphrase. It has been suggested that in the future quantum computers will be available that are capable of breaking ECDSA encryption. A hardware wallet can generate a true random number which is then used to create a seed. This seed is then used to provide a master key for a deterministic wallet. This way you could store your bitcoin with the knowledge that it will be safe from theft or loss in any conceivable scenarios for the next 50-100 years.

Mustapha Ghezlane