Show only hardware wallets for users in certain countries

[Cobra-Bitcoin]

Feel free to shoot down this idea if it's dumb:

What if we only recommend hardware wallets in a new redesigned choose your wallet page? Obviously not everyone in the world can afford a hardware wallet, so we'd only show the page to users in certain countries where the average salary can make buying a hardware wallet a relatively inexpensive purchase. The page would compare and contrast the various hardware wallets and help the user pick the right one for them. Buried away we could also have the option to dismiss the page and just show software wallets.

I have this feeling that a lot of the reason more users don't adopt hardware wallets is because they initially get comfortable and started with a regular software wallet. At first maybe they will only have a few hundred dollars of BTC, but over time, they accumulate more and just never get around to moving over to a hardware wallet because it seems more intimidating. If we can make their first wallet a Ledger or a Trezor, it would get them going with a secure foundation right away.

Thoughts?

[crwatkins]

I like where you are going with this and perhaps we could add some features to the wizard to promote hardware wallets to those in situations (such as high value) where appropriate. I'm not sure I would be comfortable hiding software wallets for reasons including the following:

• I think that hiding or restricting information is usually the wrong approach to the desired goals
• I wouldn't want people to think they have to have a hardware wallet
• In the wallet wizard, the currenet logic is that the difficultly of hardware wallets is not for beginners (that's getting better)
• Users still need to make informed selections of software to use with their hardware wallets

[jdabs]

Interesting concept. I agree somewhat with @crwatkins . I also wouldn't want to give the impression that Ledger and Trezor are the only infrastructure to get a hardware wallet, when other free, open source options are available to make a hardware like https://bitkey.io, which would also have the benefit of bringing costs down. If users are willing to try a well-documented DIY process to make a hardware wallet, with the main benefit of saving costs, then favoring Ledger or Trezor would seem that this option isn't available.