Meh. Your Trezor could get bricked and you'd be fine as long as you have your seed words to create the wallet elsewhere.
Discussion
Bricked, yes... but my fear is the dev's heel turn and rug. Not that I want to spread FUD, I'm just extremely paranoid 😅
even if your Trezor dies, you can import your wallet into electrum or another wallet that supports BIP-39. It's okay to be paranoid.
True.
And what about the wallets in a Trezor that are hidden with a pass phrase?
Hidden passphrase is just an extra word. Its not stored on the device
How do you test a seed phrase works without risking divulging the seed phrase online?
Trezor has a feature specifically for this.
Take a second hardware wallet, reset it, enter in the seed phrase during initialisation, check it can access the wallet / generate the same addresses. Seed never goes online.
When you first get a your Trezor or any hardware device, set it all up, send $10 worth of bitcoin to it, factory reset it, restore with your seed words, make sure the correct balance shows up after restoration is done. You have now tested your seed words and recovery. You can now transfer more bitcoin to your device's address.
not a bad idea to test a transaction by sending all funds from a test utxo to another address in the same wallet. Ensure signing works (highly recommended in multisig setup) It sounds dumb now, but I can’t tell you how many times I sent test utxos between wallets before I realized I could just send utxos to the same wallet as a test
Agreed - in addition to this, I recommend having multiple devices. Create the first wallet - reset and restore. Then restore to a different hardware device - perhaps from a different manufacturer. Most of my setups are pairs of devices and wallets are pairs of pairs across to device types. ColdCard has a cloning feature which works perfectly. You can also test without sending transactions by just validating the wallet fingerprint or verifying the addresses it generates. They will be identical. Use a password (13th or 25th word). Store your seed on a physically durable material (like stainless steel). Store this separately from your password and preferably have copies and devices in multiple geographic locations.