How to keep your virtual coins safe from physical thieves

Stealing your cryptocurrencies is no longer the exclusive domain of hackers and scam-artist. Last month cointelegraph reported how a cryptocurrency trader was robbed of an undisclosed amount of crypto, at gunpoint. The article cited a couple of similar cases from Russia and the Ukraine.

Physical theft of virtual coins might get more common as cryptocurrencies gather mainstream attention. You hopefully know how to keep your coins safe from hackers, but what would actually happen if somebody broke in to your house and forced you to transfer all of them bitcoins?

Well, you would most likely do the sensible thing and just hand it over. However there is a neat trick on both the Ledger, and Trezor hardware wallets that can keep most of your coins safe.

In short, the trick is to have two wallets on the same device, one main wallet with few founds and a hidden wallet, hodling most of your funds. In case of a robbery you simply unlock your main account and hand over the portion of your funds that is stored there, while keeping your hidden account safe.

On the Ledger Nano S, this feature is called Plausible Deniability and consists of a two pin system, one for each wallet.

On the Trezor wallet, the feature is called Multi-passphrase encryption.

As everything else in life, you are liable for your own actions and you do this at your own risk. These are advanced features, so be sure that you understand what you are doing before doing it.

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