Think of a hardware wallet as a hard drive that you store your coins on. Like a video on your computer hard drive vs one stored in the cloud.

In order to confirm that you want to send or spend money, you usually have to physically press buttons on the device and verify other "off device" information, that was generated at set-up,

Now that's an over simplification, but accurate.

If you lose your wallet or it is stolen, you can restore to a back-up device, so a lot of people buy 2, just in case.

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