alt Hacker News> Hardware wallets are not a solution to self-custody.
Nothing in this world tends to be "the solution", everything has tradeoffs.
Say you want to do self-custody, what is then the best option? "Don't do self-custody" obviously isn't the solution, as the core use case here is self-custody, so what in your opinion is a better way, than hardware wallets?
If there is nothing better today than hardware wallets, then for now, they are "one of the better solutions" for how to do self-custody, even with the current tradeoffs. But again, I'm eager to hear what the alternatives are.
There is no solution yet.
From a bird's-eye perspective, 3 things are needed: Create a key, derive an address from the key, store the key.
Creating a key safely is possible with dice. You would probably create a seed phrase instead of a key directly, but for this discussion it is the same.
Deriving an address from the key is hard and I have not yet seen a good protocol on how to do it. I have read through a bunch of descriptions of how people do it and they are all weak and brittle. The most popular seems to be "I order a hardware wallet and follow the instructions that come with it". But even people who put a lot of thought into it come up with weak and brittle approaches. I would think there is a way to do it safely. But I have never seen a description of one yet. It might involve multiple computers, multiple software implementations and a hell of a lot of work to create a multisig that is not prone to a single attack vector.
Storing the key is probably the hardest. The most popular way seems to be to store it in a drawer or a safe. So now those coins are just as safe as a piece of gold would be. Or they use a multisig and store the keys in multiple locations. Quite painful. As you have the ongoing problem of keeping those locations accessible and safe at the same time.