Ashok Daryanani 🇦🇪

I just received @Bitkey and wanted to share some thoughts on it and my personal experience. This is from the perspective of an EU customer. First, when I opened it, it really felt like a premium experience. The actual device itself felt very solid in my hand and heavy, like a rock (in a good way). The screen was also nicely done, something many people don’t seem to know: Bitkey now has a screen so you can confirm transactions on the device before sending. But if you’re from the EU, expect to pay a heavy premium. Taxes and import duties alone were about €100, roughly a third of the total price. Insane, really. The actual cost without so many taxes is around €200, which in my opinion is acceptable since they’re also offering a multisig solution and promising to be online and sign transactions in case anything goes wrong. What I noticed when ordering was that if you’re a US-based customer you can pay with Bitcoin, but if you aren’t, you couldn’t, which is sad. Luckily @milessuter offered to help me pay in Bitcoin. Very much appreciated! I believe in what Bitkey is trying to do, and reading its docs it seems like a solid setup for the non-technical crowd. I have it set up now and it works well, but before I go into what I like, let me just tell you what didn’t work. The initial process to get it set up was a real burden for me, not because the onboarding experience was bad, but because of what happened afterwards. After I closed the app for the first time, I was no longer able to open it (luckily I hadn’t put funds in yet). Every time I tried to open the Bitkey app it crashed. If I reinstalled the app it worked, but I had to restore my wallet, and then after closing it again the same issue happened. I tried clearing cache and storage. Clearing storage did work, but again, after restoring the wallet and closing the app the issue came back. On my third attempt I tried basically everything: enabling notifications, enabling the “send without device” option, logging in with biometrics, basically all the settings I could try. And after that, for some reason, the app never crashed again. I reported this to Block and they told me they are looking into what caused it. Another problem during setup was entering my email. As soon as I typed one letter the keyboard stopped working, same issue if I tried to add a recovery contact. I had to paste my email in; that way it worked, but typing it out didn’t. Weird bug which is easily fixable. But that’s where my problems ended. The app works now and I can try it out fully. Before I go deeper, a quick TL;DR on how it works under the hood (and mind you, I’m not super technical, so this is based on my understanding): You’ve got one key on your phone in the app, one on the device, and the third at Bitkey, which is only there as a backup in case you lose one of the keys, or even BOTH of them. More on that soon. While my app was crashing I did get to see how the recovery process worked if you lost your phone but not the device, which was very smooth. During the installation you can back up your phone key to Google Drive or iCloud (if you’re on iOS). The key gets encrypted and stored on your cloud service. If you lose your app you simply log in to your Google account and Bitkey will find that backup key and you’re back to normal. No seed phrases needed. What’s genius is the recovery contact concept. This is for the extreme situation where both phone and device are gone. Your trusted friend or family member can get an encrypted version of your phone key. They can initiate the recovery process with Block to recover your wallet. If your friend turns bad, Block automatically sends you an SMS and email that stops this process, and you have a 7-day cooldown period before Block ever helps your recovery contact move funds. During that window you can act. Again, can you technically vanish off the planet, not read your email or SMS for a week, and have your friend move your funds? Sure. But that’s the social layer of Bitkey. You shouldn’t give it to just a random guy; ideally this contact is your wife, husband, mom, etc. so to truly lose funds not only do u need to lose your phone and device, your recovery contact also need to loser their phone, and you can add more than one recovery contact. so maybe if you were on a boat with the device and your family and the boat went down then maybe then you are fucked. When you get your new device (which you would need to order if this extreme scenario happened), Bitkey and your recovery contact would move your funds to a wallet for you that is linked to your new device and app. Pretty smart design if you ask me. The device doesn’t give a seed phrase by design, a concept that is hard for many of us to accept, but in my opinion is the future. The design itself ensures there is almost no chance of real loss of funds unless an extreme attack hacks both your phone and Bitkey’s servers at the same time and can therefore sign a 2/3 multisig transaction (my understanding), which, if you ask me, is such a low chance I wouldn’t ever worry about it. But a risk indeed. Currently you are locked to the Bitkey app and can’t really use this hardware wallet like any other where you can use Sparrow Wallet or something. So many may say “what if Block went bankrupt?” In that extreme scenario (which I might add is really extreme; this isn’t a small little start-up; it’s a very well-funded company behind one of the biggest payments apps in America and POS systems), sure, that’s a real concern. You can download the emergency kit in the wallet, which gives you a detailed explanation of how to withdraw funds without them. Too much to go into here in my opinion, but it seems solid at first glance. Another thing that makes this wallet very nice to use is the “transfer without device” option. This lets you spend your Bitcoin without signing with your device. It works by you signing with your mobile key together with Bitkey’s key, so you aren’t really trusting Bitkey with your funds; you’re just trusting them to sign the transaction so this easy experience works. If they ever refused to sign, you can still just sign it yourself with the device. You set a limit of how much you’re willing to spend without the device. I tried $500 per day, sent some funds to @blitzwalletapp, and it worked perfectly, exactly like a hot wallet it felt, although it was a multisig hardware wallet. Top-notch UX. The app itself, UI-wise, is very nice and modern and does just the small things that, as a designer, I like, such as a small little glance effect when you hide your amount. If you enter an amount to send that you don’t have, it vibrates your phone. It’s not important, but small details like that I think make the experience feel more premium. Sounds dumb, but the small animations when you enter amounts and such show real effort rather than a bare-bones app that does everything but feels soulless. I would like to be able to label my transactions so I can write what I sent money for, in case I need a reference in the future. Showing the Bitcoin addresses so openly on the transactions page seems unnecessary to me when the whole goal of the wallet is to make Bitcoin as easy as possible. You could have it there under a button or something, but having it so openly out might just scare a non-technical user. But of course this isn’t a big deal and is just me nitpicking. Anyway, would I recommend this wallet? Sure, yes. I feel like this is the best hardware wallet for a newbie out there. It isn’t cypherpunk, but that’s what a normal person needs. Do I know for sure there isn’t an RNG problem like with Coinkite? Of course not; I cannot read the code (it is open source; I just can’t read code). But Block’s effort to explain and discover Coinkite’s issues makes me feel more comfortable. Also, they started @projectloupe, which offers any FOSS Bitcoin software the chance to apply, and Block will use the best AI models there are to check your code. Small details which I didn’t talk about: you can buy Bitcoin in the app using Blockchain.com, Coinbase, and MoonPay if you’re from Europe. I would like to see an exchange like @btcxsweden integrated so Swedish users like me can pay for Bitcoin with Swish, a local payments network here. Those are my thoughts. Will someone ever read this? Not sure, but it was fun writing it. Thanks, Oliver