Security

But not theater.

PSA: If you have bitcoin on a Coldcard, move them now!!!

Now back our regular programming.

I’ve been focused primarily on the unilateral exit since the last update almost a month ago, and it’s coming together well. Here’s a 9-minute walkthrough.

One piece I still need to add is to have fallback Esplora services. When the Ark server you rely on is down, the matching Esplora server is probably also gone. So I’ll probably add some fallbacks, and an option to enter a custom URL as a last measure.

This feature (unilateral exit) really is a huge amount of work to get right. But it’s worth it.

I also re-recorded my Arké presentation from the Freedom Tech Summit from June. Should be a good overview of the project as a whole.

And something that came up a bit more spontaneously was an iteration of the transaction browsing user experience. Previously, the user had to tap in and out of each transaction. Now there’s a simple stack of cards the user can smoothly flip through to look at and annotate their payments.

Under the hood, I also had my trusty AI clean up the docs, properly implement localization everywhere, harden a few security things, and update to newer bark bindings releases.

On the horizon in that regard is the option to fully recover an Ark wallet from the recovery phrase. Currently, this is not possible, and you need to make sure to also backup the wallet database file.

Completely unrelated, I reviewed a coin selection proof-of-concept that the Bitkey team shared. Here it is:

I am still trying to digest the Coldcard disaster. It is such a failure and disgrace on some many levels. Also reminded me of this design I made 3 years ago about annoying users when their security setup is not adequate for the amount they are storing. I might need to add something like this to Arké.

Hope you’re having a good summer.

✌️🇺🇦