Reminder: You crypto is NOT "IN" your wallet. Your keys are. Your crypto is on the blockchain.

You've heard many times someone saying "I've 2 ETH in my hardware wallet and I really make sure I don't loose the stick." or similar.

While it's convenient to say, that your crypto is in your wallet, it's really misleading to yourself and others to say that. Wallets are similar to banking cards. Is your money on your banking card? No, it's in the bank. The card only gives you access to your money to move it. But it doesn't actually contain any money itself.

Crypto wallets are exactly like that. Hardware and software wallets (Metamask, electrum, ledger, etc.) only store the seed phrases/private keys to your addresses. This has a couple of benefits:

Did you loose the wallet? (E.g. hardware wallet lost or laptop broken and software wallet doesn't work anymore.) No worries, your crypto is safe on the Blockchain. Just get your seed phrase from you backup place and put it into a new hardware/software wallet.

You want to see your crpyto without risking your keys being stolen? No worries, your crpyto is on the Blockchain! This means, that you can simply use a block explorer to see what you own and see the balances etc. without needing a key. Keys are only used to move them, not to view them. (At least for most public Blockchains.) For example, here is the aggregate of vitaliks public addresses funds on various Ethereum chains: https://zapper.xyz/account/0xd8da6bf26964af9d7eed9e03e53415d37aa96045 It's not a Blockchain explorer, but it shows all kinds of stuff he owns (publicly) and you don't need to have his keys to see that.

Don't like your wallet? Want to move to a different wallet? No worries! In tradfi, you always buy the service + UI together. If you like the service, but hate the UI - sorry, you're stuck. But in crypto, both are separated. The service is the Blockchain, but the UI can be anything. You don't like metamask, and want to move to a desktop wallet? Just take the seed phrase you got from Metamask and insert it into the Desktop wallet. Viola! The desktop wallet generates the private keys from the seed phrase and can now move the funds just like Metamask can.

However, if you move from a less secure wallet (hot wallet) to a more secure cold wallets (hardware wallet), it's recommended to also generate new seed phrases and actually move your crypto to the new address. In case you make an error and interact with malicious websites and your seed phrase is compromised, then you other addresses are not influenced.

Note: It's not quite true, that using the same seed phrase in different wallet UIs generates the same addresses and private keys. There is a thing called derivation paths, and wallet implementations sometimes use different paths to derive the keys and addresses. So you can only use the same seed phrase on other wallet UIs which use the same derivation path as your original wallet ui. For instance, metamask uses m/44'/60'/0'/0, coin space uses m/44'/60'/0' and ledger supports the same as metamask (afaik). This means, you can use the same seed phrase to access the same addresses on MM and Ledger, but coinspace is different.

Ok, that's good for today! I hope you learned something valuable ????