At the Bitcoin 2022 Conference, I participated in the “Bitcoin Is Freedom” discussion panel highlighting corruption in my part of the world as the biggest enemy of economic freedom and prosperity.
The smear article was a “hit job” by Mahmoud Abbas , his intelligence agencies and the Bank of Palestine itself in retaliation for my anti-corruption work against the Palestinian Authority.
The panel’s moderator, Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer of the Human Rights Foundation, noted, “Just imagine the psychological effect of having to use your occupier’s currency.
“In Gaza, Uqab told me, there is no Venmo, no PayPal and no easy way to transact with the outside world.
We will quickly explore the primary bitcoin self-custody options available and explain why the SeedSigner project is particularly well suited to address people’s needs in Palestine and throughout the world.
You could also use your wallet to use bitcoin as a medium of exchange to buy or sell products or services, again with no limitations or restrictions.
But this sort of wallet is considered “hot” because the “secret” that controls your bitcoin — your wallet’s unique private key — is stored in the wallet software itself which is on a device that’s connected to the internet.
Your private key secures your bitcoin; if anyone else gets it, they can steal all of your funds.
For greater security, it would be ideal to keep it easy to receive bitcoin at any time, but have more protection around the ability to spend your bitcoin.
Instead, in such setups your private key is safely stored elsewhere, within a separate custom-engineered device referred to as a hardware wallet .
Some hardware wallets plug into internet-connected devices, which, yes, re-introduces some moderate, but not unreasonable risk.
For bitcoin savers in places like the U.S., a hardware wallet is a modest outlay to secure your stack once it has grown beyond that “walking around” level of value.
Person X may be able to acquire a hardware wallet and set up their own cold storage, but Persons Y and Z are still left looking for their own solution.
Such wallets require multiple cryptographic signatures to authorize a spending transaction, thus the common shorthand name: “multisig.” A typical multisig is a “2-of-3” where three private keys are used to create the multisig wallet but any two of them can spend the funds.
Realistically, this renders true multisig cold storage nearly impossible for the vast majority of people in the world; it’s quite difficult and costly for Palestinians to acquire a single hardware wallet, let alone three of them.
SeedSigner is a completely open-source Bitcoin hardware wallet project that is built around an incredibly counter-intuitive approach: it doesn’t remember your private key.
This hardware has no wireless data connectivity — no WiFi, no Bluetooth — and is powered via an external battery or USB wall plug.
However, we’ve created a unique way to instantly load your seed: convert it into a QR code that the onboard camera can read.
After you scan your SeedQR into SeedSigner, the device now has your private key in memory.
Can you see it now?! Your SeedSigner can read in any private key, use it to sign a transaction, blank itself and then read in a completely different seed and sign a completely different transaction.
No one cares how many different contracts the pen is used to sign — or how many different people sign with it.
If someone were to tamper with the device or load malicious code, every user of that SeedSigner would be at risk.
This innovative means of communication has a huge additional advantage: it makes SeedSigner compatible “out of the box” with any smartphone that has a camera.
A “hot” wallet on your phone is not a secure way to store your wealth.
SeedSigner’s unique approach as a stateless, air-gapped signing device is a particularly compelling tool for bitcoin savers throughout the world.
One SeedSigner can plant innumerous seeds of self-sovereignty across an entire circle of real-world trust.
The Raspberry Pi Zero 1.3 that is the heart of the SeedSigner DIY build is now quite difficult for individuals to find and is completely impossible to source at scale.
We are still figuring out how to best move forward, but we know that we will need people with a wide variety of skill sets, industry contacts, investment capital, translators and so much more.