Legal
Ripple chief technology officer David Schwartz has taken to Twitter to share another comment on the recent controversial update of the Ledger wallet and answered a question about how he himself prefers to store cryptocurrencies offline and online.
As for Ledger, Schwartz believes its CEO is trying to get customers to use its new service, claiming that it will not share any personal customer data with the IRS. The Ripple CTO strongly disagrees here.
Paper wallets, hardware wallet and encrypted hot wallets
A Twitter user asked Schwartz about the methods of storing crypto offline that he prefers. The Ripple CTO wrote in response that he cannot reveal his “personal practices for obvious reasons.” However, he shared his view on other wallets. Schwartz said that paper crypto wallets, hardware wallets and encrypted software wallets all possess their advantages and drawbacks.
However, he says that he usually recommends SecuX wallets to those who just want to passively hodl their crypto without exchanging, staking or using it in other ways, such as making payments.
I won’t talk about my personal practices for obvious reasons. But paper wallets, hardware wallets, and encrypted software wallets each have their advantages and disadvantages. I’ve recommended SecuX wallets to people who just want to store crypto and not use, exchange, or stake.
— David “JoelKatz” Schwartz (@JoelKatz) May 23, 2023
Schwartz believes Ledger can leak users’ data to IRS
In the root tweet, David Schwartz retweeted a video extract from a recent interview with Ledger CEO Pascal Gauthier. The chief executive of the popular crypto hardware wallet commented on the recent update made by the company; from now on, there is an option for users to “secure” their seed phrase by encrypting it and sending it to three different devices in fragments.
The crypto space was shocked since this implies that crypto assets in supposedly cold wallets would now become easy targets for hackers, and Ledger would not bear any responsibility should anything happen, and these devices where the seed phrase fragments are sent become compromised.
Pascal Gauthier tried to calm the audience down by saying that this is not mandatory and that users can continue using Ledger wallet without switching this update on. But this was not what caught the David Schwartz’s attention.
Gauthier claimed that the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would not initiate any subpoena against Ledger, and even if it does, the IRS will not be interested in the personal data of Ledger customers.
Schwartz strongly disagreed with that point, calling Gauthier’s claim that there is nothing of interest for the IRS in users’ personal data “comically ridiculous.”
He stressed that Ledger would start making a lot more money if its customers accept the new service, and he referred to the wallet producer as being “so greedy to make money on this service that they completely forgot the entire value proposition of their product after all the effort they spent explaining it to people.”
