I’ve posted my about my frustration and disappointment with the Keepkey wallet a couple of times—for some reason I bought one on Amazon last year when I didn’t know too much about hardware wallets.  Long story short, it’s been hiding in its box since I tried using it shortly after receiving it but last night I gave it a second shot.

I got an e-mail from ShapeShift that had the wonderful title of “Buy Bitcoin Easily With Your Debit Card”.  Why wonderful?  Because ever since Circle jerked us all around and made their way out of the bitcoin world and wesellcrypto.com shat the bed, I haven’t had an easy way to do what ShapeShift is telling me they can help me out with, i.e., buying bitcoin with a debit card.

Another long story short, I didn’t read the fine print and did not realize the significance of that omission until after I’d gotten myself all set up and KYC’ed with ShapeShift (sort of; I didn’t have to submit a photo but did have to give them some personal info).  Turns out my state is excluded from being able to partake in that buy-bitcoin-with-debit-card service.

As I said, I finally got the damn Keepkey working.  And it’s so goddamn annoying in comparison to a Ledger, it’s not even funny.  The main issues I find head-slappingly, teeth-grittingly irritating:

1) The number of altcoins supported is laughable.  
2) The PIN input is a stupid puzzle-type thing that’s completely unnecessary.  
3) The Keepkey/ShapeShift website kept opening new tabs whenever I clicked a link.  
4) They basically required me to register with ShapeShift in order to use the Keepkey, and I find that ludicrous—I’ve heard there’s a way around that, but it sure isn’t obvious from any of their instructions.  And again, if you compare the Keepkey’s ease of use to that of the Ledger, the Ledger wins hands down every time.
5) And my final thought and last foul morsel of annoyance is that the Keepkey is just a mechanism to get people to use ShapeShift, but you wouldn’t know that if you were just on Amazon and saw the Keepkey description, which is exactly how I got suckered into buying this piece of shit.  

Luckily it wasn’t that expensive and the box it came in will make a nice place to put my silver coins in.  If I can figure out what to do with the actual device, there might be some closure for me but I won’t hold my breath.  It’s too light to be a paperweight and too plain looking to put in the display case.  

Some people might be able to figure out a way around the ShapeShift thing and may love their Keepkey, but it's way too hard to just set up and use easily and intuitively.  As many of you probably know, I'm no tech geek and I also have little patience for bad design, so the Keepkey seems to be aimed toward either suckers or tech-savvy people who like figuring out stupid problems that shouldn't be problems in the first place.

Love to hear your thoughts on my thoughts.

Edit:  Oh wait!!  I forgot that I had to download the fucking Brave browser in order to get everything to work properly.  I found that to be almost a slap in the face, the icing on the shit cake, and the last straw.  To me, that's just downright disrespectful.

Have you tried a trezor?  (I kept thinking that while reading your post)...

Yeah I seem to remember the keep key being about $20 so there might be a reason for that... Coinbase claim to accept card (haven't used it because I'm not paying the visa fees).

I'd like more altcoins with the trezor, maybe the ledger has them, but you could also probably get away with some simple software solution to allow it - like some coins have it built into the site tools afaik.

I don't know how much I like brave, was it just a chromium based browser you needed or was it exactly brace (might have been sponsored or something if so)? I don't even like putting metamask on Firefox as it can edit your clipboard.

You are correct, and my OP here is just my opinion--but I do think most people are not looking for an overly complicated hardware wallet if they're looking for one at all.  And if some people love the Keepkey, cool.  It actually does have a nice display and has a very simple design.  It's just all that other stuff that puts a very bad taste in my mouth.

You got it.  I own a few altcoins that I wouldn't consider obscure, but I like to keep them on a hardware wallet and that's one of the best things about the Ledger, lots of altcoin support.  And it's sooo much easier to use than the damn Keepkey.

No, because I don't need another hardware wallet right now and I don't particularly care for the look of it.  And yes, that's important to me.  Aesthetics in all things, you know.

I think that this is disrespectful as well.

If a company needs to force users to download a third party browser  (this is more invasive than watching ads) just to make some money, probably it is not a good company... Hey, you already paid for their product,.

Ledger and Trezor are the best around, no doubt..

Why do you need to buy bitcoin with a debit card? If you are willing to link your checking account, you can use a larger variety of exchanges. You would probably have to wait a few days each time you deposit money into your exchange account.

Accepting debit cards is risky for an exchange and you are going to have to pay a premium for that risk if you are buying coin with a debit card.

I saw marketing materials for the keepkey and my initial thought is it is a marketing gimmick for shapeshift. My guess is keepkey doesn’t support many altcoins that are not available via shapeshift.

It can be used as decoy if you ever face the 5$ wrench issue. Just give them your KeepKey 

I'm not a user of Trezor, but from what I can read passphrase can be up to 50 characters long, and PIN can be up to nine digits long. What exactly do you mean when you say "can't be longer than 20 characters", I must admit I do not understand.

However it turns out, if users in not set strong passphrase and his device is stolen/lost, with little knowledge and in a fairly inexpensive way seed can be extracted, and weak passphrase brute-forced = coin lost.

I haven't suffered these same issues when using the KeepKey.

I was able to connect to ShapeShift using Chrome and you only need to register to ShapeShift if you want to exchange cryptocurrencies as far as I'm aware.

Realistically you need to balance the fact that the KeepKey is arguably the cheapest wallet on the market nowadays, the 50% off voucher going around makes it under $20 which is pretty crazy.

Sure it hasn't got amazing security and doesn't support many assets, but it's a decent first step for noobs and certainly more secure than most software wallets.

Definitely a decent stopgap for those savings for a better wallet like the Ledger Nano X.

I assume that the KeepKey, being based on the same hardware as Trezor, suffers from the same security vulnerability as the Trezor devices (voltage glitching to extract seed)?

So I did some digging and yes, it is possible to extract the seed (and bruteforce the PIN) from the KeepKey...

https://blog.kraken.com/post/3245/flaw-found-in-keepkey-crypto-hardware-wallet/
https://blog.kraken.com/post/3248/flaw-found-in-keepkey-crypto-hardware-wallet-part-2/

But like the Trezor... if you have a (strong) passphrase set, you should be "OK"

I've not used a KeepKey, with it's "native UI" or Electrum... so I'm not sure exactly how "clunky" it is to use a passphrase with this device... with the Trezor ONE it's relatively simple... if somewhat vulnerable to keylogging.

Any KeepKey owners can comment? Do you put it in with the device or via the computer keyboard like Trezor One?