Love this - Thank you! Ben at btc sessions on you tube has great content for hardware wallet comparisons.

I prefer a signing device in case I need to move funds. Paper wallets are good and all but if i understand them you’ll have to always enter your seed phrase if you ever need to make a tx.

Ultimately your cold storage should depend on your stack size. Trezor is good for ease of use and has a good rep of being secure, but since your key is generated online there’s a small added risk. If a large portion of your savings are going to cold storage you probably want to use something like cold card which never exposes your keys to the internet or a computer at all. Cold card is great and might be intimidating at first but if you watch btc sessions tutorials it’s actually super easy.

Savings in cold storage using a signing device. Can keep some on a mobile hot wallet for spending. Back up your seed words for your savings on steel. Use a strong passphrase but store separately from your seed. This is in case your back up is found by someone, without passphrase they still will not be able to access the funds. For a beginner, I’d say Blockstream Jade or Trezor with bitcoin only firmware will work for your needs.

If you like to only hodl for the next years, it should be enough to generate a public key in order to generate addresses. Therefore you may set up a Electrum-Wallet on a (disconnected) tailsOS, copy the public key (write down your seed!!!!) and shutdown the tails. So there exists no "cold storage" device that can be found by someone else. With the public key: set up a new "watch only" Electrum wallet to hodl your values.

If you want to spend the BTC (some years later), just create a new wallet with the recovery-seed.

This should be the safest way for hardcore-hodlers. 💪🏻

Glad to hear, that you did your first payment with BTC. But be aware: The first merchand transaction took place in 2010. 2 pizzas (25$) for 10.000 BTC, worth today appr. 290,000,000 $. 😬

you sound like me, so I'll tell you how I do it:

hardware wallet - ledger

lightning wallet - bluewallet

buying/DCA - strike

A couple notes about the above. When I first started off in my bitcoin journey a couple years ago, I was using ledger live as the software to connect to my ledger, but I started running an umbrel node at my house and I couldn't figure out how to connect ledger live to my own node so I started using sparrow wallet instead. Also since I started running the node, I was able to change my lightning wallet from Wallet of Satoshi, which is custodial by default, to bluewallet, which I was easily able to connect to my umbrel node. I only keep < 250,000 sats in my lightning wallet and the rest in my ledger. I also have a lntipbot lightning wallet which has like 10,000 sats that I use for nostr zaps. I don't keep any sats in strike or any exchange for an extended period of time (I have been burned in every possible way you can think of in exactly the ways everyone will warn you about lol). This setup took me a long time (years) to settle on and was an iterative process so don't be too hard on yourself about getting the exact perfect solution right off the bat (most important concept in the beginning is just the hardware wallet aka cold storage for large amounts). I think one of the best videos I saw on the topic that helped me out a lot when I was first starting was by Andreas Antonopoulos here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zNVDIz6Snw&t=1s&ab_channel=aantonop