Securing Bitcoin: From Personal Sovereignty to Institutional Defense | BTC Prague 2025 Panel

At the BTC Prague stage, three hardware wallet builders — Douglas from Bitbox, Charles from Ledger, and Thomas from Trezor — sat down to talk about what actually keeps Bitcoin secure: from your first hardware wallet to institutional-grade custody. Here’s what we shared.

Not Your Keys, Not Your Bitcoin

The answer to “how do you save in Bitcoin securely?” is almost embarrassingly obvious coming from a panel of three hardware wallet manufacturers: buy a hardware wallet. But the reason matters. When you hold Bitcoin on an exchange, you don’t actually hold anything — you trust that they have it. History has shown us, repeatedly, that this trust is often misplaced.

What you actually own when you own Bitcoin is a private key. That key is your proof of ownership. Lose it, and your Bitcoin is gone forever. Let someone else get it, and they become you. There is no bank to call. There is no reversal. The blockchain is immutable and there is no third party.

Three Things Every Hardware Wallet Must Do

When you store a private key on a phone or computer, you’re trusting a device that was never designed for security. Malware can silently steal your keys. A proper hardware wallet solves this through three essential properties: generating and storing the private key inside a secure enclave, performing cryptographic operations without ever exposing the key, and showing you exactly what you’re signing on a trusted display.

That last point is critical. If your hardware wallet has no screen, you’re trusting your phone or computer — devices with millions of lines of unauditable code. A hardware wallet without a screen is security theater. The screen is the entire point.

Start Simple. Seriously.

One of the biggest mistakes people make is overcomplicating things from day one. They read about multisig, passphrases, and elaborate vault setups — and then they lock themselves out of their own wallet. Security at the cost of usability is a cost to security. If you can’t use your setup correctly, you will eventually make a mistake, and that mistake could cost you everything.

Start with a basic hardware wallet. Use the defaults. Get comfortable. The more advanced features — multisig, passphrases, miniscript time locks — are worth exploring only once you genuinely understand what you’re doing. The number one threat we see isn’t sophisticated hardware attacks. It’s phishing. It’s people typing their seed words into fake websites. It’s human error.

When Should You Get a Hardware Wallet?

You don’t need to wait until you have significant Bitcoin. You can buy a hardware wallet before you own a single satoshi. All of our products let you purchase Bitcoin directly through the companion app and move it straight into self-custody. You bypass the exchange entirely. And beyond security, you gain something just as valuable: knowledge. Using a hardware wallet teaches you how Bitcoin actually works — what a private key is, what a transaction looks like, what self-custody really means.

Backing Up the Backup

The hardware wallet secures the key, but the seed phrase — those 12 or 24 words — is just as powerful as the device itself. Anyone who has those words has your Bitcoin. Write them down. Consider stamping them into metal so they survive fire. Store them somewhere safe. In some jurisdictions a bank vault makes sense; in others, you may want a more distributed approach.

At Trezor, we invented BIP 39 — the seed word standard that every wallet uses today — and more recently developed multi-share backup, which lets you split your backup across multiple locations or trusted people. But none of this matters if you type those words into a scam website. That still happens every single day.

Institutions and Governance

Self-custody for individuals is straightforward. For organizations, it’s more complex. You don’t want any single person — not even a CEO — to have unilateral access to funds that belong to users. That’s where governance layers come in: wh