Ledger Nano S review & experience sharing

After 6 months of using Ledger Nano S I would like to share my experience on this hardware wallet and some tips to help newcomers in the crypto world. I will try to provide explanation in simple language. If you have one too or going to buy one, then I hope this article will help you.

What is this? In short this is an offline crypto wallet for those who owns, mines and trades crypto currencies such as Bitcoin, Ether, Litecoin etc. This is one of the leading brands, together with Trezor.

Does it matter? Well. Investing into a hardware wallet is recommended especially if you own significant amount of BTC or Ether. You might ask how much is considered as significant. It depends on individuals. Typically if your coins are worth more than your 2 weeks salary then you should consider investing in one.

There is a lot of good info on the internet about this product on how to setup and use them so I am not going to repeat them. I just want to share some experience that I have found so far.

Ok. What's my experience then? I have 2 main experiences to share.

First, there are only limited wallets you can keep in each Ledger Nano S. I own 2 Ledger Nano S from different batches. The firmware that I have on the first ledger is Secure Element 1.3.1 & MCU 1.0, second one is Secure Element 1.3.1 & MCU 1.1.

I installed 5 wallets (Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, NEO and Qtum) on my first Ledger. But the second one I could only installed 4 wallets (Bitcoin Cash, Ethereum, NEO and Qtum). I tried a few times to install Bitcoin but it showed me "Insufficient remaining space. Please uninstall some applications." message. I do not know why and I guess it could be due to the size of the firmware. But it is safe to say that each Ledger Nano S can hold 4-5 wallets max.

If you have more than 4-5 coins in possession. Then what should you do? There are 2 ways to do it.

1. Uninstall some least use wallets and only maintain the most frequently used 4-5 wallets. If you need to do any transactions on the least used wallets, then uninstall the most frequent ones and reinstall with the wallet you need. It will take a minute or two to uninstall or install a wallet so it is still not too bad. But it is still a cumbersome process to some. Do note that even though you have uninstalled the wallet, you can still receive the coins in the blockchain. The wallets will synchronize the balance once you have reinstalled them back.

2. Get another Ledger and keep different wallets in different Ledger. For example BTC, ETH, NEO, QTUM in the first Ledger, and BCC, LTC, XRP, DASH in the second Ledger. Remember to label them too. In this case you can avoid the hassle to uninstall/reinstall different wallets.

My second experience to share is that it is good to have a backup wallet in case of emergency. Backup wallet here means I cloned another Ledger, by inputting the same 24 seeds as the first Ledger. In this case I have exactly the same wallets, same addresses which I can use or perform transactions interchangeably. The clone can be made between Nano-Nano, Blue-Blue, or even Nano-Blue. But you have to keep them separately.

By making a clone that means in case of fire or lost, you can still have immediate access to your coins without the need to wait for new Ledger device to arrive, so you will not miss any opportunity to trade should the market go up. Or in the case of theft and you scare your 4-8 digit PIN code has been compromised because you wrote it down somewhere, you can immediately move the coins out from the Ledger to a temporary storage, before resetting the Ledger. Do note that if anyone enter the PIN code incorrectly 3 times then the ledger will reset to factory setting and wipe out all master seeds. This is the safety feature to protect your coins. So it is good to remember your PIN code rather than writing them down.

So far the Ledger Nano S has served me well - making transaction from Ledger, checking balance, opening app from Chrome, installing/uninstalling wallets etc. I have no major complaint other than the insufficient memory thing. But I believe in the near future there could be a better product in the market to address this issue.

Hope this helps. Cheers!