Amsterdam based Blocktrail has just announced its own new Bitcoin wallet is now available to consumers with web, iOS and Android platforms.
Blocktrail has previously dipped its toe into the Bitcoin world with useful analytics tools and now it is announcing that its powerful new platform is made available to consumers as well.
For the long term Bitcoin still retains attractions, both as an alternative store of value for some and, perhaps eventually even more important, as an informational solution to the age-old problem of maintaining a secure, but also transparent to its users, open ledger account for economic transactions entered into over both distance and time.
As a crypto currency Bitcoin has at times attracted major interest on the part of currency libertarians as well and, after coming out of nowhere six years ago, even traded at a peak of close to $1, 00 per Bitcoin in November 2013. With the subsequent collapse in commodities and rush to the US dollar as a safe haven, yet again, the Bitcoin price then collapsed to its current $237 – around a quarter of the peak. Not a pretty sight, but just one necessary step on a more complex and interesting journey towards maturity perhaps.
The difficult trick has been to make it safe, after some high profile scandals, and also reasonably easy to both use and understand. Important VC money has already gone into outfits aiming to do just this such as Blockchain.info and Coinbase, which both already offer Bitcoin wallets for managing a stock of Bitcoins. Other major VC interests are, as well, looking into the complex blockchain technology itself, that underlies and underpins bitcoin, as a means of solving other kinds of similar informational problems.
Blocktrail’s newly launched wallet claims to have easy-to-use, sophisticated features, and automatic inbuilt security by design. Its intent is to put the user in complete charge of their own Bitcoins, without any third party being able to access the Bitcoins, including Blocktrail itself – and to eliminate completely the need for other fiduciary storage entities which until now have been a major risk stumbling point for the acceptance of Bitcoin.
Blocktrail does this by giving its users complete control of their Bitcoin’s private keys. Delivered with best-in-class technology features, such as multi-signature transactions and HD wallet functionality, Blocktrail wallet users are able to make use of the latest technologies available in the Bitcoin protocol.
In case you re a bit mystified, like the rest of us, HD wallet stands for the hierarchical deterministic (HD) key creation and transfer protocol (BIP32), which allows creating “child” keys from “parent” keys in a hierarchy.
Blocktrail’s wallet therefore enables anyone to easily start sending and receiving Bitcoin with the highest degree of privacy and security. Eliminating peer-to-peer transaction friction, Blocktrail wallet users can easily send bitcoin without exchanging bitcoin addresses.
“Blocktrail’s wallet packs the best of Bitcoin technology into an easy-to-use wallet that is friendly enough for the anyone new to Bitcoin” says Boaz Bechar, Blocktrail’s co-founder and CEO. “… by making sure that users maintain full control of their private keys we’ve built a wallet service that is secure by design, and stays true to values which the Bitcoin community holds highly”. Bechar is a serial entrepreneur from Israel and has backing for this new venture from Russian high tech investor Lev Leviev (a co-founder of Russian Facebook rival Vk.com).
“We are interested in bringing Bitcoin to the masses, to the widest audience possible, ” says Leviev. “For example one of the functionalities that’s available and we’re going to improve is that you can send Bitcoins to anyone in your contact list even if they don’t have a wallet downloaded.”
In an initial report published yesterday on the prestigious tech website TechCrunch, Bechar is quoted as saying the advantage of a decentralised wallet, is precisely that the BlockTrail wallet user retains control over their Bitcoins, and can’t be locked out by a centralised service provider should that entity decide they need to freeze your account, say, or be told to by the authorities. Or should they be hacked. Or else vanish into the ether taking your coins with them – as with the Mt. Gox exchange saga. The nascent Bitcoin landscape has had more than its fair share of Wild West moments already.
Tech Crunch takes care though to point out that of course some people might actually want the reassurance of trusting a large, well-funded entity that has insurance underwriting the risks of hacking so the company can claim it will reimburse users for any lost Bitcoins. But as BlockTrail’s co-founders then rebutted, that’s not so very different to trusting a traditional bank. And if it’s centralised financial control you’re after then why are you even involved with Bitcoin at all? For the rest of the TechCrunch report go to the article on its original site at:
All in all, we know that Silicon Valley loves to find tech solutions to all the problems of the world, after all that is the lens through which they look at life, and preferably it hopes to find answers that are as disruptive as possible.
So once upon a time there was the internet and Netscape, that begat Google and Amazon. And after the dot.com bubble narrowly avoided destroying everything, in a flood to end all floods, things got eventually going again at an ever increasing pace, all striving to make tomorrow’s better world arrive today. With, it must be said, some extraordinary successes, whether in smart phones, taxis or maybe some day self driving cars. These are all real trends aimed to dis-intermediating relationships between suppliers and customers everywhere, and to take costs out of everyone’s lives.
And of course banks are in the end perhaps numero uno as an eventual primary target when one considers the costs built in to today’s economic systems. They tend to be fat profitable and, sometimes, immune from sanction when they screw up. All for the sake of the safety and security that they do indeed offer in a regulated universe.
Bitcoin supporters are not being slow therefore to target the sector, and good things will ultimately come in terms of new ways to deal with financial transactions, even if there have been some speculative casualties along the way. Blocktrails’s new product may indeed be a very useful new tool for this process, and now must find its way.
