Bitcoin Forum

Just stumbled upon BFL's latest edition to their website:

http://www.butterflylabs.com/bitcoin-hardware-wallet/

A Hardware wallet - It looks like a miniature tablet!  :D

Who will be ordering and guesses on prices?

It's a very sexy product but I won't give BFL a dime. My guess on price is somewhere near $1k.

Agree'd.

They look pretty sweet, but I wouldn't be surprised if these are pre-order and with a silly price tag.

Let's wait and see... But it is lovely!

I saw these and wanted one immediately. But depends on the price tag. I swear I remember seeing in a video that these are going to something like £400 but they want to try to develop and release a cheap version under £50

Signed up those do look pretty smexy and give me a tech boner but no way in hell will i pay more then $200 for it. For some fancy cold storage, would be awesome for novelty however.

This is a genius product for BFL to actually do business with, because all it needs to be is a cheap tiny Android tablet with completely trivial software to develop for it and the most basic interface imaginable.

On the other side of the coin, if even this trivially-easy product to develop ends up being vaporware, I see it much harder lying about this being "state-of-the-art" like their 65 nm fab hobbyist project.

Its cool, but I wont give BFL shit on principal. I wouldnt buy it if it was 1 dollar

i'd buy one, but keep a copy of my wallet on a USB stick, "just in case"

Looks perfect. And even if the price is ridiculous it won't take long for a cheap chinese copy to come out. In which case, I'd buy two.

Something like this might be a game changer, making the bitcoin accessible for anyone.  no apps or software installs.  People get tangible tings in their hands (even if it does stuff in software they dont get).  Right price, right interface, this could be significant.  Not sure BFL is first, I'm sure I've seen similar somewhere before.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd-GbG2WmW0

Josh stated in this video that BFL's going to try to get them in the $150 USD range. A couple/three weeks ago I PM'ed Josh expressing earnest interest that I would love to review this on my dime, offering up honest assessment from a geekless user. He replied that he would keep me abreast (paraphrased)... also, and that BFL is about Two Weeks^TM out from having said device available. (insert shitty grin here)

~TMIBTCITW

I'll wait and buy a hardware wallet from a company I have some respect for. There will be plenty of hardware wallets to choose from in 2014

But wouldn't it need some sort of network access? So, is this only going to be useful where there is free wifi? or are you going to be paying an added 'cell phone' bill to use this device?

I'm not clear why anyone would want an added device to carry around when most people have their phones with them 24/7. I have enough trouble not loosing the one cell phone and I can make it ring so I can find it. If I got this device, it'd be lost somewhere withing the month. (My luck, I'd end up washing it in the laundry)

For that BTC balance, as shown on the pic, I would definetly go with paper/brainwallet!

Sounds great if you want to have everything stolen!

Reminds me of when BFL used some photoshopped i-somthing to represent some device or another (available for pre-purchase of course.)  Or tried to pass a picture of some universities's research cluster as their own datacenter.

I might remind everyone that 'ButterFly Labs' was a some biomedical outfit from Colorado or some such which went belly-up before the first BTC was mined.  Josh wasn't in the scammer's nest at the start, but whoever was bought the company name to pass themselves off as having at least some history.

BFL was and is built completely on bogus puffed up perception gimmicks and targets people of limited mental capacity who are naturally drawn to shiny things.  They've never delivered on anything in a way that would meet the minimum requirements to constitute proficiency.

While I personally have nothing against BFL  myself I agree with you 100%.  2014 really should be a year where we start seeing multiple hardware wallets hit the market.  So I for one will be waiting for that to happen, waiting to see how early customers respond to using it, and only then make a decision on buying one if it's as good as I expect them to be. 

I'm always hesitant to buy the first generation of new things and it comes to hardware/tech related stuff  :)

I won't give BFL any of my money unless Josh personally gives me a rim job first. Oh, that should also include a reach around and a slurpy tea bag.

I think in practice hardware wallets can't exactly work in such a way that you just buy a turnkey product right off the shelf in this manner. There is no way of knowing that the random number seeding isn't compromised in some way that allows the manufacturer to issue pre-determined private keys. As such you really can't trust a product like that any more than you might a web wallet that stores keys server-side.

The only way a product like this actually makes sense in my opinion as any kind of secure wallet is if the manufacturer produces the unit as a hardware platform with a completely open and documented API, and open-sources the software in such a way that you can confirm the checksum against an independently-compiled build, or where the process of initializing the device involves compiling yourself and loading the binaries directly onto the device.

Be careful what you wish for  ;D

I'm not tech savy enough to know if it meets the requirements you just listed, but what are your thoughts on trezor.  I believe they are open source.   http://www.bitcointrezor.com/

Trezor is indeed open source, and looks excellent. Launch got delayed from October to January, which will probably turn to February, but as long as they deliver a solid product, all good. Not sure the price though?

hahaha, I need a slurpy tea bag from josh too...

What I know about this is:

They were hoping to sell them for $40, but the E-Ink screen turned out to be so expensive that they'll likely have to sell it for $140.
The device will be waterproof, with the internal circuitry sprayed with a sealant. Hopefully this means that it can be safely washed in a washing machine (albeit accidentally).
They plan to include bluetooth, which will let it use your phone's 3G connection to broadcast bitcoin transactions instantly (no WiFi though).
Since this has both a screen to display QR codes, and a camera in the back, you will be able to do offline transactions without needing to be connected to the web. First device that gets a web connection will transmit all cached transactions (this is partially supported by Schildbach Android Wallet too btw).
There will be a MicroSD slot, which you can use for multi-sig. You can store private keys on different SD cards, and spending from a multi-sig address will require you to plug in all SD Cards that have the required private keys one at a time.
Blame this on me if I get this wrong, but estimated ready to sell time is by the end of Spring or some time this Summer.