LEDGER and TREZOR users, answer me THIS!

Okay, Ledger and Treasure users, answer me this. Why do you think your seed phrase cold storage setup is not dependent on just one vendor? Because news flash, it actually is dependent on one vendor. And I’m going to explain to you why. And I’m going to explain why the criticisms of BitKey are not wellfounded. First of all, a little bit of context. So over the weekend or the last day or two or whatever, I listened to a Guy Swan episode with American Huddle and it was like three or four people and as usual they are lamenting the difficulty of cold storage and all that sort of stuff which makes zero sense. Uh Guy Swan should be supporting and promoting Bitkey not Bitbox. Bitbox is absolutely not user friendly and not well suited for the vast majority of people. He ought to be talking about BitKey. I would love to give Guyswan a free BitKey. I’d love for him to try it out. Who cares who’s sponsoring what? Like, please, please, please try it. Anyway, as usual, these episodes just make me mad cuz all these people are like, well, cold storage is just too complicated for the average person or BitKey is actually often brought up and positive things are said, but then dismissive comments are made about, yeah, but hardcore Bitcoiners have concerns about just a single vendor or something like that. And every time I hear this, I think, okay, this is moronic. People don’t realize that no matter what uh hard cold storage hardware wallet you are using unless you are doing distri uh geographically distributed multi- vendor multi-IG then you are dependent on one company. Now I I will fully admit for 1% of all the people that will ever self custody or maybe.1% of all the people that will ever ever custody a geographically distributed multi- vendor multi-g makes sense. It certainly makes sense for Coinbase or River or Strike or anybody that’s managing huge balances on behalf of thousands or millions of customers and even for Bitcoin OGs with massive stacks. Sure, you go do multi- vendor, geographically distributed, multi-IG. The vast majority of people that is too complex. There are too many ways they’re going to mess it up. they are far more likely to lose their Bitcoin or for their loved ones not to be able to get a hold of their Bitcoin in the event of their you know incapacitation or death or whatever. Bit key is the answer to all of that. So let’s dive in first of all to why you are dependent on a single vendor in the vast majority of cases if you are using a seed phrase. You see, when people are using a seed phrase, they’re thinking. They’re thinking. They’re not thinking, but they think they’re thinking. What they’re thinking is, I’m not dependent on any vendor because I can upload my seed phrase to any hardware wallet. Okay, you Who do you think generated the seed phrase? Whichever wallet generated the seed phrase, you are dependent on that vendor for your security. Because it doesn’t matter if you can take that seed phrase and move it from a treasure to a ledger to a cold card to a bit box to a blockstream jade. It doesn’t matter if the original seed phrase is compromised or the original seed phrase is not secure. It will remain unsecure for the entire life of that seed phrase. So, if you generated a seed phrase in 2021 on a cold card and then you feel so proud of yourself because your seed phrase is stamped on a metal plate and then you decided you like treasure better, so you uploaded it to a treasure. And then you decided you liked Ledger better, so you uploaded your seed phrase to a ledger and you left behind cold card five years ago. Guess what? If your seed phrase was generated on a cold card five years ago, it’s still insecure. It doesn’t matter how multi- vendor you think you are because your insecure seed phrase is just getting uploaded to different wallets. You’re still dependent on a single vendor which is whichever vendor generated your seed phrase. Now with BitKey you don’t have to worry about that because they are using the Amazon Nitro secure enclave to generate one key. They’re using the iPhone or the Android phone to generate another key and they’re using another entire environment uh to on which is the uh uh silicon labs to generate a key on the bit key device itself. Three entirely different technological environments. So if there’s a bug in one of them, guess what? Bit key requires you to have two out of three keys. And it does all that in a very elegant way that’s you don’t even realize what it’s doing. It doesn’t tell you how the keys are working, but there’s three of them. So you’re not dependent on just one vendor. Now you are dependent on Block, the company that makes Bit Key to put all the pieces together and to not screw something up there. They have separate teams working on it. The team that built the Amazon Nitro secure enclave is not allowed to touch the code of the BitKey physical device. And that team’s not allowed to touch the code of the of the App Store iOS app and Android app. None of those three teams are allowed to touch code in any of the other areas. Which means in order for something to go wrong at block, all three teams would need to be coerced by some other entity to compromise the security or they would all have to fumble the ball in all in exactly the same way, which is not going to happen because the private key generation happens completely differently in all three environments. There are no seed phrases with Bitkey. That is the brilliance of it. So, uh, also now let’s assume you’re like a crazy crazy crazy person who made a seed phrase with a combination of rolling dice and flipping coins, which nobody does. Like, I mean, what, five people on planet Earth have ever done that and you But, but let’s assume you did that based on a printout guide you got off the internet. Well, how do you know that the print off guide on the internet is secure? How do you know that that’s not compromised? that no matter what combination of dice rolls and uh coin flips you do is not going to spit out one of a relatively small number of seed phrases. So even that you’re trusting whoever made that guide to be secure. One second. So you’re either trusting whoever made the guide or you’re trusting whoever made the hardware wallet which made the seed phrase for you or even if you made a seed phrase yourself. Let’s assume you you cut all BIP39 words, all 2408 of them into tiny little squares of paper. You perfectly mixed them in a massive mixing hat. And then at perfect random, you pulled out 24 words that were perfectly random from the entire sample set of 200 of words. And you remember, you can’t just do it by pulling them out because you have to put the word you just pulled out back in the hat and remix it each time. Otherwise, you don’t have complete perfect randomness. Guess what? Even in that situation, as soon as you upload that seed phrase to a hardware wallet so that it’s actually usable in the real world, guess what? If the firmware of that hardware wallet is compromised, it’s going to send that seed phrase right out to an attacker or right out to the government or whoever compromised the firmware. So, people act like when they generate a seed phrase with a hardware wallet, which BitKey does not do because seed phrases are not secure. People act like when you generate that seed phrase, it’s so magical that nothing can go wrong. No, it was generated by a single company. You’re either trusting Ledger or Treasure or Cold Card or whoever to make that seed phrase. And if they screw that up, you lose everything. And we found out with the cold card hack that they did screwed that up and the people did lose everything. Now, thankfully, Cold Card was a tiny company with relatively few customers. But if Ledger or Treasure got compromised in the same way, there would be a much bigger impact. Now, do I think that’s going to happen? It’s not likely. It’s much more likely that people with seed phrases lose their Bitcoin because they lose their seed phrase or they lock themselves out of their hardware wallet or they forget their PIN code. There’s a million things that could go wrong or the inheritance is not set up or it doesn’t work because it’s really hard to do that with Treasure and Ledger and these other other solutions. So, look, I get it. In the right circumstances for a tiny fraction of the population that is doing self-custody, a geographically distributed multi- vendor multi-IG is a better option. But that’s like almost nobody for the vast vast vast majority. Somewhere between 90 and 90 I would say somewhere between 99 and 99.9% of all of the people who should be self- custodying Bitcoin as individuals should be using it with a bit key. And guess what? If you want geographically distributed multisig, go stick your bit key in a safe deposit box at a bank. That way, your bank and you are not in the same place in an unsecure environment. When the bank is closed, guess what? Hackers and scammers can’t get to your bit key because it’s in a safe deposit box at a bank and it’s closed. And during business hours, if somebody sticks a Sorry, let me wait for a very loud aircraft to pass here. Um, all right. So, and in a situation of duress, somebody sticks a gun to your head and says, “Give me all your Bitcoin.” You can’t because your Bit Keys is in a safe deposit box at a bank. And I promise you, no bad guy wants to go to a bank to go get your Bitkey with you at gunpoint. If they did, they’d go rob the bank. What do you think? They’re after your Bitcoin? No. If they’re willing to walk into a bank with a gun, they’re going to rob the bank. They’re not worried about your Bitcoin. Bad guys are not going to go to the bank with a gun to your head. That’s never going to happen. Which means if your bit key is in a safe deposit box at a bank, you have geographically distributed multi-IG. Bit key itself is multiig by default. That’s the only way you can use it. It is a multi- signature product. Um, and if your bit key is out of bank, then that means virtually all the time it’s geographically distributed. Your bit key is not where you are. And when you’re together, like when you need to move very large balances of Bitcoin around, you are inside the bank, you know, in the little area where the where the safe deposit boxes are, you get your little safe deposit box. You get your bit key. You touch it to the back of your phone to tr to initiate the transfer. Then you put it back in the safe deposit box. You don’t ever walk out of that bank with your bit key. Like if you have a large Bitcoin balance, that bit key should never leave the bank. If you need to move it, you go to the bank. You touch the bit key to the back of your phone while you’re inside the bank and then you put it back in your safe deposit box and you lock it back and then you walk out of the bank. That ensures that your Bit Key is never transferring huge Bitcoin balances unless you are safely inside a bank or somewhere that has very secure safe deposit boxes. Okay? So you can already get geographically dist distributed multi-IG yourself just by putting your bit key in a safe deposit box at a bank. Now are you still trusting one vendor? Yes. block, the company behind BitKey, they still put all the pieces together, the Nitro, Amazon Nitro Secure Enclave in the Amazon cloud for their services, the, you know, the Silicon Labs uh BitKey device and the mobile app that’s made by Block, the same people behind the Square payment terminals and the uh the Cash App mobile app. But guess what? Those are super secure. The company, one of the best companies in the entire world, if not the best company in the world for security, is a company that’s doing financial transactions all day every day, which Square is with their payment terminals. Vast quantities of money and with Cash App, vast quantities of money. Those people know how to secure financial assets and they know how to secure Bitcoin. So again, if you think you’re using your your seed phrase that’s stamped in a metal plate is not trusting one vendor, you are trusting whoever made your seed phrase. And if you upload your seed phrase to anywhere, you’re trusting that that vendor’s firmware has not been compromised and is not sending your seed phrase to somewhere else on the internet. And if you generate your seed phrase in some sort of bizarre airgapped, you know, draw 248 words from a hat situation, as soon as you upload it to anything to actually make it usable to generate a public key so that you can actually send Bitcoin to it, guess what? Wherever you punch in your seed phrase, doesn’t matter if it’s a ledger or it’s a treasure or it’s a cold card, as soon as you punch in that seed phrase, if their firmware has been compromised, it’s going to send it out to the internet. Now, I don’t think that’s going to happen. I’m just saying the fact that you’re trusting one company, that is not a good criticism of Bitkey or Block because you’re doing the exact same thing with Ledger and Treasure and Cold Card and all these other things unless you have a geographically distributed multi- vendor multisigg which is like three or five keys and one of them’s a ledger and one’s of them a treasure and one of them’s a cold card. So none of the keys are using the same vendors at all. then sure you’re trusting you have multiple different companies that would have to fail. But Bitkey already gets pretty close to that by using the Amazon Nitro Secure Enclave and by using Silicon Labs for the BitKey device itself and for using their own amazing security team to write the mobile app. You’re already getting that. So yes, it’s all under the block umbrella, meaning the company behind it is still the one engineering all those components, but it’s the closest you’re ever going to get to a geographically distributed multi- vendor multi-IG in something that actually regular normal people can use. But if you’re using a Ledger or Treasor, just realize, or any other hardware wallet that is single sign signature, you just got to realize you are only as secure as whichever device generated that seed phrase. And if you upload that seed phrase from your metal stamped plate from that was generated by a cold card or a ledger or a treasure, as soon as you enter that seed phrase into any other Bitcoin hardware wallet, you are only as secure as that Bitcoin hardware wallet and the firmware that is on it. So, you’re trusting somebody. You’re always trusting whoever generated the key and you’re always trusting whatever vendor you uploaded that private key to in order to make the Bitcoin usable. You can’t get around that. You’re always trusting something or someone. And in the case of Bitcoin, you’re trusting the developers behind the Bitcoin core software, which is reviewed by tens of thousands of people worldwide. Probably the most secure software stack in the entire world, but it was still written by humans. At the end of the day, trusting BitKey is the absolute trust minimized way that is accessible to everyone. The only thing that is more trust minimized than Bitkey would be multi- vendor geographically distributed multisig something like 305 from Casa or something like that which is vastly too complicated and way too errorprone for all but very technical people to do. It’s just and the probability you’re going to lose your Bitcoin doing that is much higher than the probability that you’re going to lose your Bitcoin using Bit Key. Because with Bitkey, you’re not going to lose your Bitcoin with inheritance because it’s super easy to set up. You’re not going to lose it by losing the device because recovery is super easy. Losing your phone because recovery is super easy. As long as you have one recovery contact set up with Bit Key, the probability that your Bitcoin is safe and secure on BitKey is higher than a three of five geographically distributed multi- vendor multisig. And the reason for that is in a three of five multi- vendor geographically distributed multi-IG the probability you are going to lose your Bitcoin is higher than the probability that something bad is going to happen with Bitkey due to technological or malicious intent. So if somebody just said if somebody came to me today right now like while I sit here and they said Joel I have a million dollars of Bitcoin and I need it to be as secure as conceivably possible. What should I do? I just I want to not lose it. That is the only thing I care about is that 10, 20, or a hundred years from now, that Bitcoin is still in the possession of me or my heirs. That’s all I care about. Maximum security so that Bitcoin is still there. I would say stick it on a bit key, make sure you have at least one recovery concept contact set up and go put that bit key in a safe deposit box at a bank. that has the highest probability of your Bitcoin still being there in 10 years or 50 years or 100 years. And if somebody came back and they said, “Yeah, but I think I’m going to do a a Casa 305 geographically distributed multi- vendor multi-IG. Is that more secure?” I would say that is technically more technologically secure. But the probability that your Bitcoin is not going to be there anymore in 10 or 50 or 100 years is actually higher because the probability that you or someone else is going to mess that up or the people that are supposed to inherit it are never going to get it because of a you know process mishap. Yeah. So maybe maybe maybe a 305 multi- vendor geographically distributed multiseg is slightly safer from hackers and scammers, but it’s infinitely more errorprone by you and your loved ones. Meaning the probability that your Bitcoin is ever going to still be there at the end of the day is actually lower than if you just get a bit key, stick it in a safe deposit box at a bank, and make sure you have at least one recovery contact in case you lose your phone and your Bit Key device at the same time. So there is no way in the world to eliminate trust entirely from everything. Bitcoin is the absolute maximum trust minimized money in the world. Bit key is the absolute maximum trust minimized way to secure your Bitcoin that exists that is accessible by everyone. Again, if you’re like super technical and you want to spend days, weeks, or months setting up the world’s most perfectly secure blah blah blah, whatever, I still think the probability that you or your loved ones is going to lose your Bitcoin because you’re going to do something wrong is higher than if you just use Bit Key. But regardless, for the vast majority of people, somewhere between 99% and 99.9% of all the people who should be uh self-custodying their Bitcoin, BitKey is a better solution for the vast majority of people in all those situations for all the reasons I’ve given you. And if you are using a single signature wallet, if you have a single signature wallet, meaning one seed phrase generated by Ledger, treasure, cold card, it doesn’t matter. If you are using or even if you have a single tangim, you know, key that’s replicated off across three cards, but it’s only one key. It doesn’t matter if you have two, three, five of them. If you have a single key and your Bitcoin is secured by a single key, then you are trusting only one vendor and your Bitcoin is much less secure than if you were trusting BitKey. And if your Bitcoin is on an exchange like River or Strike or Coinbase, then again, not only is it subject to hacking and scamming and all of that with a much higher probability than any anything else, but your account can still be frozen or your assets can be seized by the government or by a court proceedings. Bit Key solves all of that. Everyone, please, please, please. We live in an age of AI. Kimmy K3 is breaking software all over the place. Bitkey has already been hardened against Kimmy K3 and all the AI engines out of China. That’s already happened with BitKey. Don’t wait until your bank is hacked. Don’t wait until a major cryptocurrency exchange is hacked. Get your Bitcoin on BitKey now. If you own more than 5,000 or $10,000 of Bitcoin, that means the $250 price of Bitkey is worth it. Get yourself a Bit Key. secure your Bitcoin so nobody in the world can freeze your funds, seize your funds, confiscate your funds. Your account can’t be restricted. All of that is off the table if you’re using Bit Key. And you’re not going to lose your Bitcoin to hackers and to scammers unless you like blatantly send your Bitcoin to a scammer like they sweet talk you into literally transferring your entire Bitkey balance to them. But again, that almost never I mean I would say that practically never happens. I have never heard anyone losing Bitcoin because they actually sent their Bitcoin to a scammer. They always lose it because it’s a roundabout account compromise, seed phrase, update, uh, you know, install this software, up update your seed phrase, link your Coinbase account. It’s always a roundabout way because people generally are not dumb enough to just transfer their entire balance to a scammer. But they are willing to give up credentials and two-factor authentication and log in on fraudulent websites and, you know, upload their seed phrase and enter a fraudulent free seed phrase and transfer their balance to a a fraudulent, you know, device within the integration interface. People do that stuff all the time. With Bit Key, you sidestep all of that because unless you blatantly just send it from your Bitkey to the scammer, which I don’t know why you would. That’s like blatantly obviously a scam. There’s no way for scammers and hackers to get your Bitcoin. It’s really brilliant. Bit key is absolutely brilliant. Please use it before a major exchange gets hacked or a major hardware wallet vendor that single signature gets hacked. Please buy yourself a Bitkey. $250 is not a large percentage of 5,000 or 10,000 or however much Bitcoin you have. It’s so easy to use. You can’t screw it up. It’s brilliant. Please buy yourself a Bitkey. Secure your Bitcoin.