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Brad Mills 2y ago

Does anyone use BIP85 to onboard friends and family in a way that you can hold their keys for them to make onboarding to Bitcoin easier?

Looking for a good user experience around helping friends and family get setup with a bitcoin wallet where I can help them secure their keys until they are ready to go it alone.

Most people lose their keys, and holding a copy of everyone’s individual seed phrase is both a liability and not scalable.

I wish there was a way to onboard someone in your trust circle to a “starter wallet” as their Sherpa, where:

1) we didn’t have to go through the whole seed phrase / no 🔑 no 🧀 thing at the beginning of their stacking journey.

2) it doesn’t make security trade offs because I always have the ability to restore their funds if they screw up and switch phones or lose the keys or something.

3) the UX was smooth (not simply me generating BIP85 seed phrases and giving them to people to enter into their phone)

Anyone working on this trusted social onboarding tool?

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Discussion

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Laser 2y ago

I'd like to do this once #Sparrow ships #BIP85 support...

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MaxMoney21M⚡ 2y ago

I may have been known to do this once in a while. That is, if I or anyone I knew owned any Bitcoin, I would have.

Just make sure you use different BIP-85 accounts for each person 😅

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Brad Mills 2y ago

What do you mean

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MaxMoney21M⚡ 2y ago

Bad joke. (Like: don't accidentally give the same seed to different people.)

But BIP-85 for Uncle Jim setup is really good, IMO. If I were doing this, I would also set up a little watcher script to watch for transfers, in particular transfers spending the entire wallet. Just in case they misplaced their seed and didn't notice it...

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MaxMoney21M⚡ 2y ago

If it's a non-techie person, just give them a Trezor and a seed card already filled out. Show them how to input it and plug it in. Set their wallet up on Blockstream Green, pointed to your node.

People might not like this idea but if Grandma wants to hold Bitcoin, it's alright that she trusts you completely IMO.

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counterweight 2y ago

Not the most scalable and requires the person to trust you (Uncle Jim), but if you have your own LNbits instance, you can easily create new accounts there for them and set them up with a Lightning wallet in Bluewallet that's hosted in your LNbits.

They can easily send and receive through lightning, and if they somehow lose access to their BW/phone, you can easily set them up on a fresh BW again.

#[2] explains it nicely in one of his guides as usual: https://darthcoin.substack.com/p/the-bank-of-lnbits

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counterweight 2y ago

In my opinion, this is good enough for starting. If they ever accumulate a significant amount of money there and it's time to move to a cold wallet, you are in a much better position to have their attention and interest. Since they already have money at stake, they won't be rolling their eyes the way they would if you started ranting about complicated key thingies when they hold 0 sats.

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AC Hawthorne 2y ago

I’m exploring this as a solution for paying my kids sats for allowance and chores. It works great for kids without phones. Also you can use LNURLs printed on the fridge to send quick sats to each kid.

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counterweight 2y ago

The moment you start fiddling around with LNbits, you quickly have more ideas than you can even implement.

At a coworking space I use, the guy has a static LNURL QR code made with LNbits so you can pay with Lightning instead of putting coins on a piggie.

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Modus 2y ago

"COLDCARD® makes it easy to use. COLDCARD's Derive Entropy function employs BIP-85 and generates new seeds which are easily imported into other wallets. One COLDCARD, one master seed, one backup, thousands of possible wallets."

- from bip85.com

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Rob 2y ago

I think a good solution is to run an lnd hub and get them to connect to your node through bluewallet. This way you are the custodian of their bitcoin and they can still spend it easily with the app

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78e47dfe... 2y ago

If your friends can't handle the responsibility of keeping a seed phrase safe, they probably shouldn't be driving a car either.