We’re talking long-term bitcoin savings here. For a bitcoin account that you spend more frequently from and store not as large of a balance, you can make a good argument for using an SE-equipped wallet. But for your long-term stash… If you secure your bitcoin using an SE-equipped device, you will still always need to keep an analog copy of the private key as a backup for the digital copy, right? So now you have two copies of the seed / private key to protect, and what do you do with both of them? It doesn’t make sense to store the seed with the HWW b/c what if fire/flood/etc? So you need another location. But you just don’t want to leave a bare, unprotected seed in a safe deposit box or other remote location (unless perhaps if its part of a multi-sig setup), so then you likely end up adding a BIP39 passphrase to the seed to protect it. But the goal of the BIP39 passphrase is to protect the seed, which is also the hardware wallet’s job, and then using the passphrase with the hardware wallet is overkill and a pain with most HWWs. So why not just let the analog copy of the key be the only copy of the seed you need to worry about, because again, this is your long term savings and you won’t be accessing the key very frequently. Now think carefully of the best way to secure that key — maybe you do add a passphrase? Or maybe use it as part of a multisig quorum where you have redundancy in case a key is somehow lost or stolen. Not all bitcoin storage use cases are the same, and I firmly believe our model makes much more sense for long term saving. More info at: