What this is
One hardware wallet holds a single seed. The device signs transactions; you confirm on its own screen and buttons. Your seed is backed up once or twice on metal, stored somewhere secure. That’s the whole setup — and for most people starting out, it’s the right one.
This is the simplest form of self-custody that isn’t outright negligent. There’s a single mental model to learn, and it isn’t hard.
What it’s good at
- Simplicity. One device, one seed, one backup. Little to get wrong, little to forget.
- Cost. A capable device runs $79–$250. No coordination software, no service fees.
- Fast recovery. One seed phrase into one wallet and you’re back. No descriptors, no quorum to reassemble.
- Universal support. Every wallet app and every guide supports it.
What it’s not good at
The single point of failure Everything rests on that one seed backup: it must never be lost and never be seen. Any single event that breaks one of those — a fire that takes an untested backup, a photo of the words, a nosy visitor — can take everything. The rungs above exist to remove exactly this weakness, at the cost of complexity.
- No second layer. If someone gets the seed, they can spend the coins. Nothing else stands in the way.
- Coercion exposure. With one seed, an attacker who forces you to hand it over sees the whole balance. (Rung 2 — a passphrase — is the usual answer to that specific worry.)
Who should use it
Holders whose stack is modest relative to their net worth; anyone in their first year of self-custody; anyone whose main concern is exchange risk rather than a targeted physical attacker. The near-universal pattern across custody experts is small balance on single-sig for convenience; large balance on multisig for security.
Leaping straight to a five-key setup adds complexity you’re not yet equipped to manage — and that complexity is a larger threat, at this scale, than the ones it defends against.
Planning for inheritance
Single-sig is the easiest setup to pass on — and the easiest to pass on badly. Your heirs need two things: to find the backup, and to know what it is and what to do with it. A metal plate in a safe means nothing to someone who doesn’t know it’s the key to your Bitcoin. Write a plain-language instruction, stored with your estate documents, that a non-technical heir could follow. Findability — not cryptography — is the number-one way inherited Bitcoin is lost.
When to climb
Move up the ladder when a real reason appears, not for the feeling of more security:
Until one of those is genuinely true, a well-managed single-sig setup is not a compromise — it’s the correct answer.