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This week in the world of Bitcoin Wallets:
  • CoinOS had a UI makeover. Now it progressed from a more technical/cypherpunk appearance to a more polished, cooperate interface. The old version is still availabe under classicCoinOS with a bit more functionality. But it leverages the same backend. It seems that the possibility of using the service without any registration is gone for good. But the registration is a farce without any checks, which is a good sign. I hope their .onion site will be up and running again soon.
  • Nunchuk had a massive update. You can read all of it HERE. I'll try to highlight the most important features. I missed the fact that nunchuk is available on Android, but it is. So they get the primary key account feature on android. It's an authentification model, where you can use a privat key to log in. It's a great feature, but to my understanding, it is not advisable to use a key you actually sign transactions with. What really got me going was the custom BIP32 derivation path thing. To my understanding, it should be possible to generate xpubs based on a custom derivation paths, which is great if you use diffrent accounts as watch-onlys etc. I tested it but wasn't able to generate a derivation path. Maybe I haven't understood this correctly or I am simply too stupid. What also caught my attention is, that Nunchuk didn't have a real release history on Github. It should be open-source but on Github it's a bit diffrent than what I am accustomed to. I try to contact them a few days ago, but didn't receive feedback. Maybe I will clarify in the future.
  • Open Bitcoin Wallet (OBW) or "Obiwan" (I like this) by NBD got released. If it has to be a lightning wallet, I recommend this one. Why? First of all, it's a fork of SBW SimpleBitcoinWallet. And SBW is/was amazing. It has TOR connectivity built in, LNURL support, onchain wallet including HWW support and most important it is a light LN Node, where you can open and close channels at will, as well as buy inbound. The main developer online dreaming has turned his back to bitcoin due to his involvement in the war in ukraine. So don't expect new releases on SBW. That's where OBW steps in. It's more or less the same right now and fiatjaf is stepping up in the future development of this app. What's also worth mentioning is, that my favorite LN bitcoiner zerofeerouting is somewhat a default in this app. Additionally it increases the focus on hosted channels. I really like the concept of hosted channels. Not because of the uncle jim thoughts behind it, but more from a privacy perspective. Trust is involved with this, but privacy on L2 requires some form of trust or custodianship. SBW has great privacy defaults. Combine that with hosted channels from OBW and you got a quite a reasonable private experience (at least to my understanding; privacy on LN is hard to grasp). I am excited to see this project develop.
I am a little bit tipsy right now. So if I missed something, feel free to reply. Constructive criticism is always welcome and if that article was of value to you, share some sats!
Peace,
Meister Eder