Why Use An Air-Gapped Computer Bitcoin

I get many questions about this so I’ve decided to write about why an air-gapped computer (AGC) for Bitcoin security might be desirable for some people.

Reason One

The primary reason for an air-gapped computer (AGC) is to check the functioning of your hardware wallet (HWW). To begin with, when your HWW generates a private key, how do you know that private key is truly random? You are trusting it. If you use some method to make sure it’s random, like adding a passphrase or using (for example) ColdCard’s dice-roll function to add your own entropy (randomness), you are ensuring the seed is genuine, but you are not necessarily checking that the addresses that seed creates truly come from the seed.