Episode Details

One of the things I get most stoked about when I look at the leaderless yet unstoppable growth of Bitcoin is the organic unity of minds that coalesce to bring new and exciting things into our reality.

Unapologetically devoid of any central organising committee, but instead bound by the forcefield of Bitcoin’s core principles of value, freedom and decentralisation, I am repeatedly left in wonderment watching waves of new initiatives breaking all over the world, promising new and exciting capabilities that have never existed nor even been possible before.

Like SeedSigner (the nym – who we will now refer to as “SS” for the purpose of this brief article) and his creation of the SeedSigner (the project) – an open-source Bitcoin signing device developed to reduce the cost and complexity of executing multisig Bitcoin transactions.

Driven by the proverbial mother of all invention, SS had been considering for some time how he could improve the security of his long-term Bitcoin holdings. Unhappy with his solution at the time – based on using Bitaddress.org to create wallets & private keys and then Shamir sharing/key sharding to add an additional layer of security – he was searching for something better.

"You start to wonder – as the gains happen – about your security setup. I wanted to get my security setup right, and multi sig was getting to the point where it was starting to be accessible to people”

When he became aware of the concept of multisig, I suspect he probably didn’t realise what a rabbit hole he’d stumbled upon. Tuning into an episode of the Stephan Livera Podcast with Michael Flaxman, he heard Flaxman describe a means to “10x your Bitcoin security” using new multisig via tools like Specter Desktop.

The legions of Specter fans out there (and those of you who peeped our previous feature with key contributor Ben Kaufman) will already be aware that their excellent open-source repo not only contains the blueprints for its multisig wallet software, but a DIY hardware wallet build too.

With his natural inclinations towards techie tinkering and 3D printing sufficiently piqued, SS figured he’d take a shot at putting a unit together to try out for himself.

The experience, in short, blew his mind.

"The first time I signed a transaction with multisig, I can only compare it to the first time I sent a Bitcoin transaction or the first time I ever sent a lightning transaction; it was this magical lightbulb moment"

SS

It was the start of something.

When Flaxman subsequently tweeted about how cool it would be to have a neat enclosure to tidy up the loose parts and wires of his self-assembled Specter device, SS responded in the best way he knew and knocked-up a prototype for him. With Specter’s innards now neatly stuffed inside a perfectly formed 3D-printed case, Flaxman described the experience of using it as a game changer: “You go from dangling loose wires to a securely mounted professional (enough) device with NO SOLDERING”.

"For me, it was kind of a game to see how low I can drive the price down to get this basic signing functionality; where people can use the device to create private keys and then set up a wallet and actually transact with the Bitcoin network"

SS

Buoyed by the experience, the pair started talking about using a much cheaper, stripped-down Pi ‘Zero’ and small Waveshare LCD which could be used as an air-gapped device for calculating the 24th (checksum) word in a seed. SS then decided to add a camera to the unit which would allow users to scan QR codes and sign transactions, turning it into a fully-functional tr