My biggest question about Bitkey (bought 2 when it was on flash sale for $25 dollars but haven’t used it yet)…The materials suggest that your keys can be recovered in a catastrophic event where you lose your phone and your HW device via trusted contacts. I take that to mean, assuming to set up trusted social contacts, that the trust social contact will have a copy your mobile key (which I understand will only have certain permissions) on their iCloud. And so then in hard loss event your trusted contact helps your recover your mobile key and then you initiate the HW replacement flow and use your mobile key and the Bitkey server key to transfer your funds to the new HW wallet key. Is this the correct understanding?
Discussion
That's roughly right but the trusted contact has a key to decrypt the mobile key. They don't have direct access to the mobile key. See more details here https://bitkey.build/sharing-our-recovery-design/
This is great, thanks for sharing the link.
Ok, now that I’ve read that I’m revising my opinion. I’m just putting some thoughts here for a sanity check.
Cloud backup - I missed that before. I don’t like the platform lock-in, but that’s not a deal-breaker for me.
Trusted contact - At first, I thought this was an alternative cloud backup, which would enable a multi-platform workaround. But, after fully reading it seems to be an extra security layer on top of the normal cloud backup, which is nice.
Break glass - It seems that as long as you have your hardware key this sort of overcomes the platform lock-in since it includes an encrypted copy of your mobile key & you can theoretically make multiple copies. It doesn’t really overcome the inability to migrate between platforms though. Only to sweep your funds & migrate away from the Bitkey.
All that said, I do now think that I’ll set it up & use it to replace my hot wallet as it seems to offer a bit more security.