Topic: Monetize Armory development with dedicated hardware (Read 522 times)

I like those ideas very much!
Especially the "Rule based 2FA" is great! This solves problems which weren't solvable until now!
Thumbs up, I like your thinking!

Ente

Specialized hardware is great, but it is hard to do correctly and usually doesn't gain critical mass to be profitable. IMO, I would rather see Armory try to monetize using low/no trust online services. I will briefly describe 2 that I would find valuable, but I trust the Armory team to do what makes the most sense.

1. Rule base 2FA online oracle.

Basically you would setup an M of N wallet with an Armory web service being one of the M. You could then go to a website provided by Armory and setup various rules (BTC per transaction, BTC per day, approved address, etc.). Using your desktop client you would make/sign a transaction. This would automatically get submitted to the web service. The service would check the transaction against the rules you have setup. If it matches any of the rules, it would be signed and transmitted to the bitcoin network. If not, the web service would make a request for a second form of authentication (SMS, email, HTOP, etc.)

2. Hosted watching only wallets.

Basically Armory would setup a website that looks exactly like the desktop client except it could only work with watching only wallets. You would create a wallet on your offline computer, export the watching only wallet, then upload it to this website. The website would be responsible for maintaining the blockchain and connections to the bitcoin network. When you want to perform a transaction, the website would give you a file to download. You would take this to your offline computer, sign it, then bring it back to the online computer and upload it. This will be useful to people that want to use bitcoin on computers with limited resources because they do not need to maintain their own set of data (currently ~40GB).


Both of these ideas could be developed independently, but in the end I would like to see them combined to create the ultimate low/no trust web wallet. It could probably even silence the people that say you can't trust any web wallet because it could just serve you different javascript. Nothing in either of the services that I described requires javascript to operate.

I was hoping it wasn't just my own personal "underpants gnome logic"!

Armory have a pretty strong brand IMO, etotheipi has some good instincts in that regard. Being able to translate that into a business model with the help of some hardware partners would be very good for the bitcoin ecosystem, as well as securing the long term future of the Armory client. Keeping the software free and open is difficult without subsidising that somehow, and some kind of service or product has to be the answer.

I'm in!
As one of my next projects I'll play with a Raspberry Pi, Armory, and some additional hardware pieces to build a secure, convenient Armory offline signer.
I'll make it all public and open source. And I have some vision of making this an "Armory corp" product :-)

Ente

I'm thinking about this while contemplating my call a month or two ago for people to consider the most secure operating system/hardware setup for using Armory.

All the various innovations to increase the feature set revolve around security (offline signing, M of N backups, M of N addresses etc). These two strands could usefully be brought together: for instance, an Armory LiveOS CD would be a useful security appliance. And further to that, Armory terminals (maybe stratified into home, commercial or corporate editions) that do nothing but Armory with security being the end goal. Dedicated Armory signing devices, and/or fully fledged hardware wallets, would also be useful (even if such devices are so simple that it's largely a question of inking a deal to rebrand and resell an existing product, manufacturers of POS terminals and hardware wallets already exist).

Yes, I'm aware that dedicated hardware incurs even more development costs. But it's likely the best way to maintain funding for a free and open software distribution, which is always going to be a real challenge.