I went to a Bitcoin meetup about a week ago. It was my second time going, so I recognized a few people from the last time. There were also some new faces, which was nice - always good to meet more plebs. It’s a lot of fun, and honestly refreshing to speak a common language, since most people I come across still have no clue what Bitcoin even is. I think these meetups are a rare opportunity to dig into nuanced stuff and learn from each other.
One of the plebs there noticed my Leica and asked about it. Said they had some Leica lenses and camera gear at home, and wanted to show me. Being a Leica fan, I was intrigued. It felt like a cool alignment of interests - Bitcoin and photography in one place, I'm down.
A day or so later, they sent me a photo of a lens: a vintage Summaron LTM 35mm f/2.8 from 1956. I’d never seen one in person - very cool. They asked if I could help them set up their Sparrow Wallet and Bitcoin node, and in exchange, they’d give me the lens. That sounded like a good deal to me. I’m always happy to help other plebs with their Bitcoin setups - if I can, I feel like it’s a duty. So I said of course.
They invited me over which, honestly, is a pretty trusting move - and I appreciated it. Their home had some cool Bitcoin memorabilia: Fred Krueger’s The Big Bitcoin Book (even though the guy’s a total shitcoiner now), and some FTX sunglasses from Bitcoin 2022, which will surely be collector’s items someday lol.
We went upstairs to work on getting Sparrow Wallet set up on their Windows machine. I started by verifying the software download (which I highly recommend everyone do), then moved on to creating a fresh wallet using their Ledger Flex. They also had an older Ledger Nano X.
The Flex was straightforward, but the Nano X gave us some issues. I didn’t realize Ledger allows multiple wallets for the same asset, and that they can show up differently depending on how they’re configured. When trying to connect the Nano X to Sparrow, it only displayed one of the internal wallets - not the others. Not sure why. If anyone reading this has dealt with that and knows a fix, I’d love to hear about it.
All in all, it was a great experience. I was there for a few hours, mostly troubleshooting the Ledger stuff. And honestly - after that experience - I can not recommend Ledger. It’s just not a good wallet. This pleb had already heard similar warnings from others too. I suggested switching to the Blockstream Jade. It’s a solid, Bitcoin-only device from a trustworthy team, and that’s exactly what you want in a hardware wallet.