The Block Bitcoin Wallet Team reveals its plans and seeks feedback

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey’s payments company Block shared more details about its previously announced wallet, focusing on plans to combine security and ease of use/access to create a broader and less “hesitant” customer base.

Just over a year ago, in July 2021, the company called, at the time The square, confirmed that it aimed to build a bitcoin (BTC)-first hardware wallet “to make bitcoin custody more mainstream.” Dorsey had revealed that Square had considered creating a hardware wallet for BTC a month earlier.

“One of the most important jobs a bitcoin wallet has is to keep your money safe even when something goes wrong,” tweeted Max Guise, a member of the team working on the wallet.

It’s important for people to be able to know they can get to their belongings at any time to “make the leap to self-storage,” Guise argued. The fear of making a mistake while using self-deposit wallets is what makes people hesitant to use them and keeps them on custodial platforms, the team’s blog post explained.

The other important aspect is keeping everyone other than the owner out of the wallet – the problem here is that,

“Any additional protection to keep a bad actor out presents a risk that it could also trip the owner, and any new backup or alternative access creates a new potential security hole.”

What needs to be done, the team argues, is,

“We need to create forgiving recovery experiences that prioritize easier paths to get customers back on their feet when something goes wrong, with more tolerance for simple mistakes, and without a steep learning curve.”

Instead of users dealing with several different products that serve different purposes and prioritize either security or ease of use, the Block Wallet team says they want to “build something that incorporates lower-load security practices, more forgiving recovery experiences, and can be used for both simple expenses and secure savings, all in one tool” – and they “think we can do it with a 2-of-3 “multisig” design.”

According to this construction, the wallet will consist of three parts:

• a mobile app,
• a specialized hardware device,
• and Blok’s backend server.

Each will control 1 of 3 keys and all transactions will need approval from at least 2 of them. The customer controls two of these keys using the app and the hardware, while Block manages the server key “on their behalf.”

The team further made a list of what they try to avoid in order to simplify the use of the wallet and increase security, including:

• plain text backup material (seed phrases),
• remember password,
• intense identity verification via the sharing of comprehensive identity documentation.

“Relying on a circle of people you trust can be a powerful setback for safer self-storage. A way to let others help get you back in control, without having direct access to the money. How would you feel about trusting people close to you to help protect your assets?” Guise asked, adding that “acting as an emergency contact can be as simple as sharing a phone number.”

Therefore, among the goals the team has set for the wallet, they mentioned:

• the ability to enable social recovery – select a set of personal contacts that can help recover from a situation, even if both the app and the hardware are lost;
• to set limits on what money can be moved using only the app, while moving the rest requires hardware approval;
• basic setup and you don’t need to remember new phrases.

Finally, the team argues that there needs to be a better, faster and more reliable way to notify users of certain events and issues.

“Everything here is still in development and open to change,” the post said, but the team is now looking for feedback on these ideas.

Jesse Dorogusker, head of hardware at Block, wrote last July that,

“We have many questions and problems to reconcile, and we start with this product direction: bitcoin first, global distribution, multisig to achieve “assisted self-storage” and prioritizing mobile use.”

Dorsey also stated at the time that they plan to integrate their wallet with smartphones, and the code for the wallet will be open source, while they were also looking into a feature that would allow users to auto-invest in BTC.

____

Learn more:
– Square to enter crypto hardware market with Bitcoin First Wallet
– Twitter’s Bluesky finds new lead, Square Building the Bitcoin Wallet Team

– Man pledges around 18 million of his lost Bitcoin to fund Newport Crypto Hub and $51 to every Newportonian
– Trezor has seen “significantly” higher interest in self-storage amid ongoing crypto turmoil

– Crypto Wallet Trends in 2022: More Privacy, Security, Features and Choices
– Solana blames Slope Wallet for hack while Slope says “Nothing is set yet”