Quote from: thebitcoinhole on Today at 12:47:40 AM

Some misconceptions you have:

1. Nunchuk (https://nunchuk.io/) is not a NFC card, is an open source software wallet that can connect with multiple HWs. Like Sparrow or Specter. They allow users to don't trust on the software of the HW manufacturer by using a different software wallet to connect with the HW in a 100% airgapped mode. I am not talking about using them to generate and store your seedphrase, I am talking to use them as coordinators or readonly wallets.
2. Trezor offers a btc-only firmware.
3. If a HW doesn't support multi-sig, is correct to say that is less secure than a HW with the same features but not multi-sig support. Multi-sig support increases the security of a HW.
4. Other HWs are not a wearable, so people don't expect to use them on the street. A good practice is recommend people to not put your wallet in your pocket and move with it. That's why I said that users of your wallet (and any other) should be advised to only wear it if you only have funds to spend on the daily basis.

Regarding you plan to be open source in the future, I think is a bad idea to not be open source since day zero. Nobody should trust in any company with closed firmware and mobile apps. The company could just send to themselves the seedphrase you generate on the HW, and you are not going to know, because all the code is closed.

Quote from: Ringwallet on May 12, 2024, 04:48:03 PM

1. Trezor, Ledger etc are neither airgapped nor btc-only firmware. The only real difference could be multisig but I genuinely don't understand why you say it would be less secure? As for people forcing you to sign a transaction on the street, I seriously doubt that's a casual occurence, sure, there are edge-cases and dangerous locations where it could happen but it's just that, an improbable edge case. I genuinely believe it is much safer to have a ringwallet than any other software wallet (1), and in regards to comparisons with Ledger, Trezor etc the only differnece is you would have it on you, but say you have 2 rings, one you keep at home and one you keep on you. How is the one left at home any less safe than the likes of Ledger or Trezor? Considering it uses Shamir, the chip has a higher EAL rating and there's no bluetooth, wifi, inputs etc it's arguably safer than ledger or trezor.

To answer the question directly, we obviously don't recommend you go walk in a cartel-controlled neighbourhood with a ringwallet holding $1M on it, but that's completely unrelated to the technology or even the ring. You shouldn't go walk in that neighbourhoud, period. And if you do, you shouldn't have anything valuable on you, period. Because chances are whatever you have will be lost if you don't end up dead either way. Whether you have a trezor, ledger, ringwallet, nunchuck etc, the same would happen. That's not normal use case though. I highly doubt you'll be held at gunpoint on a random street/boulevard in the vast majority of countries for you to transfer the contents of your ringwallet. Especially because this is not something instant, it would take at the very least several minutes for the entire thing to happen; time in which what no one notices? It's just highly highly unlikely. And that's not even mentioning the fact that the ring has 0 markings on it of any way, there's just a very small logo on the inside of the ring. That's all.

2. Nunchuck is also a NFC card so not sure how it's safer but that's not important; I doubt that nunchuck can be run on bluewallet or sparrow software; both of which are software-wallets and genuinely less safe than a hardware solution; pretty much any hardware solution.

As for the open source part, that I genuinely understand and agree with, but as mentioned, our plan is to make it open-source, I just want us to have some time-limited legal protection from competitors just forking our code the very next day. As for us having a copy of all generated private keys, we will be using the official industry standard SLIP-0039 implementation of Shamir's Secret from Satoshi Labs which is open source, the only difference being we store it on Ace Cards as opposed to a piece of paper. Either way, with a bit of luck on the legal side I'm hopeful that it won't be long before releasing the entire code as open-source.

Basically my only wish is for us to have a 2-3 year time horizon on every release before it can be forked in a commercially product, that's all. Which is a fair thing to want I believe.

Hey, thanks for the lengthy answer and for the information. I will spend a bit more time researching this.
1. That's honestly not something we had considered previously. It's a fair point and something I really like the sound of so while it's definitely not directly compatible with these wallets you mention right now, I do see the value in something like this so I will do some more research and see if and how we can make it compatible with such softwares as well. Realistically, this won't be something we will be able to have in an initial release but it's something I appreciate and will try to see if we can find a way to make it work in a reasonable timeframe.
2. That's fair. And perhaps a good idea. We could have a separate version of the ring that is btc-only, I guess the only issue with that is I didn't really realise there's an actual market for it? But it seems to me that there might be one. I honestly had figured that most people want something that supports multiple chains.
3. That is fair. And multi-sig is one of the things we already have planned for future releases, it's just not something we think we can finish before the initial release and I didn't want to pretend otherwise.
4. I understand this. Indeed, most wallets are built to be left at home. This one is built so you can take it with you, so yes there is an added variable because of this.

Regarding the open source discussion, I understand. My reasoning is simple, I just want to have some sort of protection in place regarding competitors forking the code for monetary purposes the next day, which is why we want to have a special license with a limited time during which it cannot be used for commerical purposes while free to use for any other purpose. After a set time (2-3 years) it can even be used for commercial purposes as that gives us enough of an edge while we work on the next iteration/release.

Just to be clear though, it's possible that we may make the code open-source before the initial batch of rings is shipped. I'm not saying we will open source in 5 years. The worst case scenario is probably that we will open source it in say 12 months from now, and the first shipment is probably going to be in about.4 months from now. But that's the worst case scenario. A reasonable scenario is probably by the end of this year. This moreso depends on the lawyers than on me which is why I don't have a fully definitive answer.

Regardless of that, we will be using the SLIP-0039 implenetation from Satoshi, which is open-source and the industry standard, so I don't think us sending the seed phrases of users to ourselves is a real risk. I'll just play devil's advocate for a second and assume the worst case scenario; let's assume that we do actually send the seed phrases of people to ourselves. I am sure you are aware to make a hardware wallet you have to make a company, have shareholders etc. If that were to happen, 1. It would probably take <24 hours for everyone to find out and probably <30 days for every shareholder to get caught, charged and sentenced to jail. It's just not worth it to do something like this. There's basically 0 gain and infinite loss potential (i.e. spending life in jail) so even discounting the fact that we use a well-known, industry standard, open source implementation for seed generation etc, this isn't a real risk, for any wallet that has a legal entity, simply because no one wants to risk life in jail for 0 gain.

Anyway, I do agree with you on open-source, but not for that reason. The real risk of not being open-source, in my opinion, is that you cannot get properly audited / tested without having everyone try to break your code. That is, in my opinion, the actual value of open source. Because the real risk is not us sending the seed phrases but a well-funded bad actor finding some sort of backdoor / exploit etc to actually manage to retrieve n information from the ring/chip/etc. Obviously everyone releases things when they think they are secure, but nothing is 100% safe, even when open-source and battle-tested, so all the more reason to make things open-source and at least have the best chance of it being as safe as possible. So anyway, again, our intention is to make it open-source. I just want to make that clear. I just want some legal protection from day 2 copycats and waiting on that. That's all.

To give you some more context, the current steps look something like this: finish our fundraising round -> announce some of the partnerships we've been working on -> send out 100-200 rings as demo products to youtubers, influencers, industry-people etc for them to do video reviews and try out the ring and give feedback and only after all of that -> launch a pre-sale -> ship the initial orders -> give free access to order rings normally from the website.

Which is why I am saying that hopefully lawyers won't take an eternity to do what I've asked them to, in which case, in a best case scenario, by the time we ship the initial batch the code will already be open source. Anyway, I just wanted to clear this out because the reason we made the initial thread and etc is mostly because we wanted to get some community feedback. That's it. You can't buy anything now and that's not the intention.

And it was a good decision. We've received some feedback, like yours, which I believe is helpful. I honestly hadn't thought of making the hardware compatible with other softwares like Sparrow or Specter, but it's an interesting idea. Nor have I thought of having a btc-only firmware, which again seems like something worth exploring if there is enough interest.

Anyway, thanks for taking so much time to explain this. I will definitely read more about this and see if and what we can do with it.