The crazy bitcoin security side of me can’t really use bitkey in its current state but damn it’s cool and easy to use. Feels like a more streamlined version of nunchuk. I wish it was a bit more transparent. Right now it’s completely opaque, you can’t see the multisig wallet descriptor. The rock could just be a fancy blinking light with for all i know.

It’s clearly an all-in-one solution. It doesn’t seem that it’s intended to be used as a standalone signer. I would totally use it if I could use it that way. Maybe thats coming in the future.

Right now you have to trust that the on-device key, bitkey, and their server is all securely separated. The whole point of multisig to me is to have compartmentalized trust, but bitkey seems to be using it mainly as a recovery scheme if you lose your device, since there is no seed phrase import step

I was at least able to verify that it is using multisig, but was only able to by sending a transaction, otherwise it’s all a black box and I have to trust them.

One thing you can’t deny is that if you trust that they have implemented everything the right way, it’s a very slick and simple solution for most people.

Would I recommend this for people looking to store their life savings? Probably not, at least not until it becomes more transparent.

Ocean already implementing sv2 for the most part

I'm trying to push for self-custody, knowing full well that we are not heading for a world where everybody can own a UTXO. Mints feel like a way out of this trap but if we screw this up, we will have just many more custodians that are even less accountable to 99% of their users than what we have today.

It's a giant up-hill battle to explain to billions of users that the details of custody matter and when I see people on social media agreeing on good mints aka good custodians and projects emerge that help advertise good mints before using mints is even remotely common in this niche of the internet, I fear that 99% of users will end up using some five big mints.

In the context of WalletScrutiny I wish I could give Chaumian e-cash wallets some better verdict than "custodial" but it's hard to be justified. Chaumian mints have no proof of liabilities or reserve and even if they had, they could pull the rug at any moment. To justify a different verdict, the incentives would have to somehow break the economies of scale which I have no idea how that could work.

I'm afraid that people will use thousands of mints with all a somewhat good track record but run by some few anonymous "cypherpunks" and "privacy activists" that turn out to have started the mints only to scam everybody in a long con. I had expected to see wallets doing this by now and yes, FTX and others clearly did just that but it's not clear they did plan to go down that route from the onset. With mints, the cost of establishing such custody will be much lower so I guess more will try it.

Don't trust.

Can I send esats to anyone? Or does it have to be to another user using a mint? Does it have to be the same mint?

okay let me play around with fedimint ecash on mutiny and see if the UX is different there!

That is an absurd and disrespectful take.

It can recover your wallet using "trusted phone contacts".. So they keep your keys?