Hi everybody,
We're a week or so away from releasing the first public version of BitKey, an open source live USB key distribution designed to make secure (e.g., offline) Bitcoin transactions easier:
http://bitkey.io/We'd like to get feedback from anyone who might be interested in using something like this and/or collaborating with us on the development of future versions.
Alon and I usually have our hands full developing TurnKey Linux, but we've been super enthusiastic fans of Bitcoin from early on. After going to our first local Bitcoin meetup we discovered the elephant in the room was that there was no easy way to perform Bitcoin transactions with
adequate security.
People who didn't know enough to be paranoid were making themselves easy targets to Bitcoin stealing malware, browser man-in-the-middle attacks and a whole zoo of attacks that were old school a decade ago, while the more cautious, security-minded folks seemed to be reinventing the wheel and coming up with various cruel and unusual ad-hoc solutions such as booting from a Live Ubuntu CD offline and pointing their browser at a copy of bitaddress to create a simple paper wallet.
We started working on BitKey as soon as we realized we could come up with something better that we would want to use ourselves and that others might be interested as well. So far we and a few other friends in the local Israeli bitcoin community have been the only users of the prototype versions but it's already at a point where it's much more usable than the ad-hoc stuff we were using before.
We just need to sand off a few more rough edges and we'll be ready to go.
Cheers,
Liraz Siri
TurnKey Linux co-founder
