 Allison asks, is there any advantage in running your own node to use with a hardware wallet? Can you please explain best practices for hardware wallets from a security standpoint? What a great question. The way I think of it is as a series of steps. And I have Dr. Stephanie Murphy, my co-host on Let's Talk Bitcoin, to credit for this framing. She talked about the sovereignty staircase, where you take steps towards increased independence and sovereignty up the staircase. So down here on the ground floor, you maybe have adopted crypto and have taken the first step towards economic sovereignty and financial sovereignty, sovereignty of your data, et cetera. But all your coins are on centralized exchange, and you don't control any of the keys. So you have some independence, because you're in a cryptocurrency and not fiat, but not a lot of independence, because you rely on a third party. So then step one is your keys, your coins, not your keys, not your coins. Take control of your keys and store them securely yourself. That gives you a much higher degree of financial sovereignty. And of course, the best way to do that is with a hardware wallet. Of course, you can also do that with a mobile wallet on your smartphone, a hardware wallet for larger amounts is highly, highly recommended. All right, so that's step one. Step two is, well, how do you run that hardware wallet? Let's think about that a tiny bit. Now, most hardware wallet manufacturers generally provide an application, a software client or wallet, that you can use in conjunction with their hardware wallet in order to engage in transactions. So for example, Trezor, Ledger, they all have an application. Either it's a Chrome extension or it's a web-based application that uses WebUSB to talk to the hardware device, et cetera, et cetera. Should you use those? It's really up to you. Honestly, it's actually easier to use those than other choices. And from that perspective, if you're a novice user and this is about as much financial sovereignty as you can handle right now, good, great. You're one step ahead of everybody else, right? Literally, you're up the staircase one step. And maybe that's all you can do. And that's fine. What we need to do is encourage people with education and information and gradually help people get the skills necessary to climb up this staircase. So the second step I would take would actually be to not use the manufacturer's wallet software, but to use a slightly more sophisticated software wallet that does better things for privacy, better things for coin control, that supports the latest address features, and that is independent of the vendor of your hardware wallet. One of my preferred choices for that would be the Electrum desktop. So I use the Electrum desktop wallet on my hardware wallets in order to construct transactions. It gives me much more fine-grained control over coin selection. It has a number of advanced features for controlling fees like replaced by fee and child pays for parent and things like that. So I've increased my capabilities a bit by using that. And that's not the only example. There's a dozen different wallets that you can connect and not just in Bitcoin. For example, if I'm using Ethereum, then I would use the mycrypto.com wallet as one example and have that connect to my hardware wallet over web USB. Many, many different software applications now have support for hardware wallets that allows you a broad range of choices in what wallets you use. Now, when I do that with Electrum, I'm using the Electrum servers in order to get the information about the addresses I control and the UTXO. So it's not quite as good as I'd like it. I'm not using the servers of the vendor that makes the hardware wallet and their software, but I am still using somebody's servers to get that information. So the next step would be to reduce my reliance on other people's implementation of a Bitcoin node. So I'll take one more step and run my own node. Now, in many cases, making your own node connect to a hardware wallet is not so easy. So you can figure out there are a number of different protocols you can use to do that. For example, BTC Pay server has support for hardware wallets where you can connect your own node running on BTC Pay server to your own storefront and your hardware wallet. I do that for my little storefront, which is currently closed due to the COVID quarantine, but nevertheless, the software was working fine. So step three is run your own node and then step four is figure out a way to connect your own node to your hardware wallet. So you can not only use your nodes to see if an address has received payment, but your hardware wallet can also use it to interrogate information about its own addresses without leaking that information to third parties. Another great project for doing that is the Electrum Personal Server or Electrum X server. So I also run an Electrum X server. And what that does is it indexes the entire blockchain and creates a separate database of every address and every UTXO and every coin that's ever lived, allowing hardware wallets to retrieve that information directly using the Electrum protocol. So when I'm running my Electrum desktop, it's talking to my own Electrum server, which is talking to my own Bitcoin node and I've gone four steps up this hierarchy. In other things you can do, kind of the fourth or fifth step up would be to implement more of an air gap solution, which we're going to talk, I think there's enough time for one more question. We might talk about air gap solutions, but many wallets now support a new standard called Bitpoint 37, if I'm not mistaken. And Bitpoint 37 is partially signed Bitcoin transactions or PSBT. What this allows you to do is construct a transaction on a non-signing device, a device that doesn't have keys or signing capability on it, but does have access to the blockchain, UTXO and knows about all of the addresses that have balance, construct your Bitcoin transaction there, it's unsigned, which is one definition of partially signed, and then transmit that somehow to the device that has keys. Some of the ways you can do that is via USB, you can do it via various other things like for example, scanning a QR code, and some devices use SD cards, which is a viable way of doing that. So you save the partially signed Bitcoin transaction on a file, copy the SD card over, plug it into your offline signing device or air gap machine, sign it with the hardware wallet that has the keys, and then transfer the signed transaction back to the machine that's online. That way you create an air gap, which is only crossed by some kind of data storage device, and if you wanna be really paranoid, you use a different data storage device for moving in one direction than moving in the other direction, or you use them only once and then you fry them, whatever you want to consider there. It's actually fairly difficult to do a side channel attack with a purpose-made device via SD card or via a file system. Harder than it is to attack the device through a USB interface, for example, or Bluetooth or any other protocol it might use. So from that perspective, that's an advantage, and you can create an air gap solution. So now we're at level four, and you can keep going up these levels. You can think about other things you can do to achieve financial sovereignty, including using multi-sigged capabilities, using coin mixers in order to improve your privacy, using zero-knowledge protocols and privacy coins to increase your privacy, et cetera, et cetera. Really, there's no maximum level you can reach because this is a technology that is constantly involving. And also, there's no minimum level at which you're not a real Bitcoiner or a real crypto person. Even the person who just is barely involved and bought this thing just as an investment to get a Lambo and stored all of their coins on an exchange, they've already taken a step away from the fiat system. We should welcome them, teach them, and help them, and encourage them to take that next step to increase their sovereignty. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe, like, and share. All my work is shared for free, so if you wanna support it, join me on Patreon.