The physical Ledger is as easy to crack as it is to guess your PIN in 3 attempts, which is…not easy. Your seed phrase, on the other hand, requires no cracking at all.

It’s not hard to safely store a seed phrase. Punch it in an inert metal and hide it in the substrate of your aquarium. Select a random book on your shelf and circle the words according to some kind of logic that you’ll remember. Bury them in a canister somewhere you can access. Concert them to their corresponding numbers. Put them in a safety deposit box if you trust your bank. Split it into a couple of pieces. Write it out of order, provided you know the cipher. What makes the most sense for you depends on your situation. The idea is to be inconspicuous, but also, they’re just words and not very special or interesting ones at that–hell, I might have typed some of your words in this comment. It’s the order that matters, so the main thing is to not draw attention to them like “here is a group of words that clearly has some significance”.

Ideally, you want a hypothetical thief to not know you have crypto at all. If I break into your house I’m going to assume the safe contains something valuable. If I’m just a casual thief I’m probably not prepared to mess with safes, so that’s fine, but let’s pretend I’m a pro and either break in or lift your safe (a quick tour of the Lockpicking Lawyer’s YouTube channel will show why confidence in anything short of high-end safes can be misplaced). Anyway, so I get inside, and here’s a weird USB thingy and beside it is a set of important-seeming words. Even if I know nothing about crypto, it’ll take me about 30 seconds of Googling to realize this discovery is very interesting indeed. To that end, unless you have a very good safe, I would argue you’re better off hiding your Ledger somewhere a thief isn’t going to be interested in in the first place, like in a baggie in the bottom of your flour jar in the pantry or something.

Conversely if a bad guy KNOWS you have crypto and cares to get it, he’s not going to mess with breaking in or decrypting your stuff. He’s going to social-engineer you into giving up your keys or (even easier) threaten Unpleasant Things ™ against you or someone you love if you don’t hand them over. So again–the best defense is keeping it completely secret that you have crypto at all.

Having said all of that: Many folks who hold crypto get into it because they have anti-establishment views, and like to imagine that bad guys or The Man are lurking around every corner just waiting to poach their crypto. For the most part that isn’t really true, and you’re way more likely to lose your assets due to some kind of stupidity or inattention on your own part. So there’s an argument that all of this is overanalysis. But, to the extent that there are indeed some bad guys out there and there are some real risks, not attracting their attention in the first place is always the best strategy.