I believe Zach is failing to realize that Block's upcoming BitKey is a solution for the next billion regular people and not for early adopting technophiles.
Discussion
imo its bad product desing that detracts from the ethos of not your keys not your coins.
reliance on an app plus a hardware device with no screen for verification and a third party server just stinks. Maybe i have too much faith in humans but it seriously cannot be that hard to write down twelve to twenty four words and keep them safe.
I guess end of the day the people will decide. I have an obvious heavy bias. But man......if keeping a few words safe is to hard for people....then i dont know what we are doing here.
We invented banks because we can't keep our own funds safe. Humans need help managing their funds.
Bitcoin = “Be your own bank.”
Bitcoin = “Remove counterparty risk.”
——
These two values are marginalized or surrendered by saying “people need banks” and “trust someone else’s server”.
A person is free, of course, to move *away* from Bitcoin’s unique capabilites.
Just disappointed that the company enabling the move might be Block.
as nostr:npub1qny3tkh0acurzla8x3zy4nhrjz5zd8l9sy9jys09umwng00manysew95gx repeats: if you can drive a car, you can hold your own keys. if you can raise a kid, you can hold your own keys.
humans are smart and do tons of high consequence shit every day. they’re not dumb. education is key.
Have you seen some of the parents out there or some of the people driving? 🤣 Not all humans are good at these things and I think this is a bad example. We have evidence every day to prove a large percentage of the population suck at these things.
As for technology, I once had a woman that could not start her workday because none of the programs on her desktop were working. She was unable to work, couldn't function. The issue? Her icons were out of order on her desktop. She had 5 applications she opened in the morning to start her day and she couldn't find them just a few inches below. They moved and she thought it was broken. She was very distraught. 🥹
We've lost probably 3-5 million out of 19.5 million that's been mined. We've proved that we need better solutions. Multi-sig where one of them someone keeps for you like Unchained or Casa are best for the vast majority of people. I agree a screen to verify the transaction would probably be best, but then again I also bet after the first handful of times your average person doesn't check unless it's for a very large amount.
another perspective: they’re easy to lose when they’re not worth very much and there’s a general lack of education. I suspect this becomes less of a problem as the value increases.
This is a good point. As value increases, so does concen about their safety, and as a result so does education.
No reason they couldn’t make a pricier version with a screen for all those concerned? 🤷♂️
agreed
Has block responded to his concerns?
I don't know? nostr:npub1yauhh489aefdkzsewe5vj2u68elzxlsln7nn5yxr34e3c22vljdqkn7h9m nostr:npub1yk3pjtw0xnpmuvnf3z6un72z42t83xye69d4jsfxq2z54pera85qcwyya6
nostr:npub1lxwx9cu7pawhxl7ed6dx069mgmsw2rrqsgk98jreazs7k0s0dsrs08463a on my team replied on Twitter (link below). tl;dr stay tuned for more technical details on how bitkey works and why. We’re going to share a lot more soon including all our code
Something to note, we're not live yet and are open to changing our approach based on feedback from the community (and where we don't, we'll explain our rationale in an open and straightforward way)
https://twitter.com/max_guise/status/1674589479372480513?s=46&t=PP3SfMkafyE2S30sr4L8Vg
Hm... Reading this had me wonder something: Has any of the hardware wallet vendors ever considered accessibility?
See, I am almost blind. Reading a tiny display is not just impractical, but outright impossible to me.
Thanks for the link, I am still at the missing display section but this is quite interesting!
I found no faults in Zach’s critique. Sounds like an insecure honeypot of a product. I would not use it.
On top of his critiques, I suspect that the rock will have no way of allowing the user to generate their own seed (offline, under their own control). Meaning that you’re further trusting the rock hardware to provide unique and unguessable seeds based on good entropy.
I share his concerns that this would create a giant surveillance honey pot and is a further attack on bitcoin's fungibility. Unless Bitcoin can retain it's cypherpunk ethos and unless we can preserve the ability to transact pseudonymously then there is little point in people owning and using it. It's like we are killing the chicken to try to get the golden eggs when we sacrifice privacy for convenience in the name of "mass adoption"