by guardian

What is Bitcoin Guard?

Earlier this year I read an article about a person who was kidnapped and tortured for their bitcoin. It was the third such article I’d read in a couple of weeks, and the details & circumstances concerned me. I thought to myself there must be a technical solution to the growing number of physical attacks, and Bitcoin Guard is my effort to shift the balance of power from the attacker to the victim. The (draft) BIPs are available for anybody to implement and all code is open source. My motivation to build this is to make self-sovereign security available for everyone by changing game theory outcomes, adjusting the risk/reward for the attacker to increase risk and reduce reward. If adoption is large enough, this creates protective value since the attacker does not know if Guardians are configured, if there’s a physical response, and visually wallets are locked.

The goal of this project is to provide both technical enforcement that prevents bitcoin theft and enhance the physical security posture of the user.

A lightweight signalling protocol is implemented in a bitcoin address which sets a boolean lock state. The subsequent lock state transition is a pre-signed transaction, which enables users to activate the emergency signal without carrying private key material.

This opens a wide range of activation methods as the implementation only has to curl -X POST <sig> <rpc> to lock the Guardian.

Since the protocol and implementation are (draft) BIPs, the wallet behaviour may be deployed by both self-custodial wallets and centralised exchanges, making this design suitable for a range of custody environments.

There are several components to this design:

• Bitcoin Guard Desktop Application
• Bitcoin Guard Mobile Application
• Guardian Address Signal Protocol Draft (GASPv1) BIP
• Guardian Wallet Implementation Draft BIP

From a UX perspective my goal is to make Guardian Addresses simple to use without knowing any protocol specifics. If the user knows how to use a hardware wallet they can use Bitcoin Guard effectively.

Please note all features are in active development and may be subject to change.

...read more at delvingbitcoin.org