Podcasts: S8 E2: Charles Guillemet on Ledger 🔗 3 years ago

Charles Guillemet is the CTO of Ledger, the market leader in the field of Bitcoin hardware wallets. In this episode we talk about Ledger's philosophy for security, innovation, and how the Ledger Nano X compares to Trezor, BitBox, Coldcard and others.

This episode is sponsored by Vaultoro and Wasabi Wallet.

–––––––––––––––––––––––––– Time stamps:

0:00 – 3:01 – Intro

03:02 – The journey of the Ledger Nano X

05:00 – Bluetooth and mobile connectivity for Ledger Live

05:55 – What makes Ledger devices unique and what’s the difference between Nano S and Nano X?

09:29 – Microcontroller differences between Nano S and Nano X

11:15 – How expensive is it to break the security of a Nano S or Nano X when the hacker gains physical access?

15:13 – Ledger Live’s support for connecting a full Bitcoin node

20:06 – How Coin Control (UTXO management) works

21:34 – Tor routing on Ledger Live?

22:35 – Ledger Live on desktop vs Ledger Live on mobile

24:03 – Full node on smartphones

25:40 – Ledger Nano X vs Trezor Model T

27:45 – Ledger Nano X vs BitBox02

29:02 – Ledger Nano X vs Coldcard

31:15 – Ledger Nano X vs Cobo, Passport, Jade, SafePal & others

34:09 – What is Ledger’s DonJon?

36:09 – Charles Guillemet’s contributions to finding vulnerabilities in Trezor

37:57 – PSBT, Airgap, QR codes & Shamir

41:54 – What are the security advancements that get Charles Guillemet most excited? (Schnorr, Zero-knowledge proofs, cryptography)

45:26 – Why should we still use hardware wallets, in spite of critics?

47:06 – How can Ledger users protect their devices?

48:55 – Never type the seed phrase on your keyboard

50:23 – Is multisig the silver bullet for security? What about Shamir Secret Sharing?

55:16 – Exclusive announcement about adding native multisigs to Ledger

56:38 – What’s next for Ledger?

57:58 – Should Ledger users set up passphrases?

59:00 – Closing statements