Quote (chelsea11 @ Dec 8 2017 09:45am)
This is what I was talking about. I understand everything you said except for deleting/erasing my coins from jaxx.
Also what I've noticed is the ledger nano does not support a few of the coins I'm interested in.
Jaxx is a program that understands how the bitcoin protocol works. It can do things like generate a new address for you, which really means generating a new keypair. It also knows how to sign transactions correctly using your private key or how to verify other transactions using other people's public keys.
It's like your own personal butler who has a copy of your car's keys and you can ask him to go drive to the store to pick up some groceries or whatever. The lock on your car is extremely secure, nobody can lockpick your car and steal it without having a legitimate key. Your butler, on the other hand, is just some guy. He might get drunk at the bar one day and somebody steals your keys from him. Some butlers are more vigilant than others. Some butlers THOUGHT they were good, but then somebody discovered they are very vulnerable to some specific trick or attack.
As long as the butler has a copy of your keys, they could theoretically be stolen from him. But if you are going on vacation for a month and you don't need your car, you could just take the keys away from your butler and put them in a bank safety deposit box. Now the thieves can't steal your car, because the lock on the car is too secure and the only copy of the keys is inside a guarded bank. When you come back from vacation and want to start using your car regularly again, you would get the key from the bank and give it to your butler again. You might even fire your previous butler and hire a new one, it doesn't matter. Every butler knows how car keys work.
A trezor is like a very well-trained, very vigilant butler, who works very hard to make sure he doesn't fuck up and let someone steal your keys from him.
Does that make sense?
edit: to make the analogy closer to bitcoin, we could say the keys are not to a car but to a safe or a deposit box. You can ask your butler to take some money from the safe to pay the bills whenever you want. But the butler himself doesn't actually hold the money, he only holds a copy of the key to the money. As long as you have a copy of the key stored somewhere, you can fire the butler and later hire him or another butler back. The key is the important part, not the butler that uses it to open your safe and pay the bills.
This post was edited by russian on Dec 8 2017 11:19am