S8 E2: Charles Guillemet on Ledger

Bitcoin Takeover Podcast

Charles Guillemet is the CTO of Ledger, the market leader in the field of Bitcoin hardware wallets. In this episode we talk about Ledger's philosophy for security, innovation, and how the Ledger Nano X compares to Trezor, BitBox, Coldcard and others. This episode is sponsored by Vaultoro and Wasabi Wallet. –––––––––––––––––––––––––– Time stamps: 0:00 – 3:01 – Intro 03:02 – The journey of the Ledger Nano X 05:00 – Bluetooth and mobile connectivity for Ledger Live 05:55 – What makes Ledger devices unique and what’s the difference between Nano S and Nano X? 09:29 – Microcontroller differences between Nano S and Nano X 11:15 – How expensive is it to break the security of a Nano S or Nano X when the hacker gains physical access? 15:13 – Ledger Live’s support for connecting a full Bitcoin node 20:06 – How Coin Control (UTXO management) works 21:34 – Tor routing on Ledger Live? 22:35 – Ledger Live on desktop vs Ledger Live on mobile 24:03 – Full node on smartphones 25:40 – Ledger Nano X vs Trezor Model T 27:45 – Ledger Nano X vs BitBox02 29:02 – Ledger Nano X vs Coldcard 31:15 – Ledger Nano X vs Cobo, Passport, Jade, SafePal & others 34:09 – What is Ledger’s DonJon? 36:09 – Charles Guillemet’s contributions to finding vulnerabilities in Trezor 37:57 – PSBT, Airgap, QR codes & Shamir 41:54 – What are the security advancements that get Charles Guillemet most excited? (Schnorr, Zero-knowledge proofs, cryptography) 45:26 – Why should we still use hardware wallets, in spite of critics? 47:06 – How can Ledger users protect their devices? 48:55 – Never type the seed phrase on your keyboard 50:23 – Is multisig the silver bullet for security? What about Shamir Secret Sharing? 55:16 – Exclusive announcement about adding native multisigs to Ledger 56:38 – What’s next for Ledger? 57:58 – Should Ledger users set up passphrases? 59:00 – Closing statements