Airbitz: Bitcoin Wallets Made Easy

When Paul Puey, CEO and co-founder of Airbitz cruised his usual online financial haunts, he came across a blog by Cody Willard discussing the diversification of Willards portfolio into Bitcoin. Puey gave in to his curiosity and became engrossed by the new cutting edge technology. Months later Puey and Scott Morgan, CFO and co-founder of Airbitz were aboard a plane provided by Tech Flight a company accepting Bitcoin for private plane charters. The Pilot was Trace Mayer and they were heading to Media Bistro’s Inside Bitcoin Las Vegas. It was on this flight that Puey and Morgan discussed what would soon become the Airbitz Wallet and Directory. With Bitcoin it seems that anything is possible.

“At Airbitz, we aim to bring bitcoin to the next billion users through amazingly simple, yet feature rich applications focused on ease of use and ease of security.”
— –Airbitz

Much like a car, the engine of bitcoin can be complicated. Few have committed their time to researching the intricacies and details behind bitcoin. The mass market, for the most part see the filler caps on a car engine with ‘oil’ and ‘water’ labelled neatly, but the mechanics behind it remain a mystery. However, both cars and bitcoin have a function that everyone can understand, they are going places.

“Our focus is to deliver software, services, and products with an amazing user experience, both visually and functionally, simplifying this advanced technology and delivering it to the masses while still retaining Bitcoin’s core principles of decentralization and privacy.” – Airbitz

The core inspiration for Airbitz is the mass market, especially the average Joe, who doesn’t understand Bitcoin. Airbitz wants to be the first stop shop for the newbie. There are so many choices out there, but the Airbitz UI (User Interface) requires little prior knowledge of Bitcoin. It is in essence a functioning educational tool for Bitcoin, an educational bridge from traditional money to digital currencies.

Airbitz is shutting the hood on the Bitcoin engine and in doing so is hiding the complexity. The UI is designed to be easily navigated, and Airbitz uses an interface the mass market is already familiar with in traditional mobile banking.

“We’ve got a tonne of functionality that I think hasn’t been seen anywhere. Not even in regular wallets like PayPal and we’re already looking at adding more.” – Puey

A simple login and password allows users to create and access their account from any iOS or Android device.

• The app can hold multiple wallets which can be renamed, sorted, and viewed by the new user like separate bank accounts. Whether it is a savings account, a beer account or just a general spend account the choice is up to the user.

• The payee, categories, and notes of transactions can be edited and searched from within the app much like Quicken or Quickbooks.

• Funds can be easily transferred between wallets in just a few taps, making this process even easier than in conventional banking.

• The iOS version can support Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) to seamlessly pay nearby wallets or merchants. This avoids a new user having to familiarize themselves with QR codes. Android BLE support will be integrated once Android v5.0 comes out of beta.

• The wallet is integrated with the Airbitz Business directory much like the mobile wallets of Square and Paypal.

• Multiple fiat currency support allows the user to assign a fiat currency to each wallet in their account.

• A decentralized server architecture allows wallets to work even if Airbitz servers go down.

“Finally Looks like we have the perfect wallet app to give power to the people, Craigslist and BitHalo style.”
— – Nathan Basanese, Changetip

In addition to these unique features security has also been a main focus for Airbitz. Protecting their users is not a challenge that has been taken lightly. The simple password selection and login on the surface looks rather simple, which is ideal. However underneath the hood there are elements Airbitz is pioneering.

The password selection field uses an algorithm to inform new users how much time it would take to crack their chioce. This is different to current password setups in which the user is told "it’s weak,” which can come off as a little demeaning. With Airbitz the user is encouraged to choose strong passwords by presenting them with tangible feedback on their chosen password.

The Airbitz password recovery feature is another new and exciting innovation. When setting up a wallet for the first time, the last thing you want to hear is, ‘don’t forget your password, or lose your private key, because you will lose your bitcoin!’ This is a scary possibility and an area where the banks won out in the past. With Airbitz users are able to recover their password by setting up a series of recovery questions and answers.

The selection of questions were reviewed by an independent security auditor. The user currently chooses six questions and answers, with several that cannot be found on any public record.

“What is the birthdate of the best man at your wedding?”
“What is the first and last name of the person you first kissed?”
“What time (hour & min) and day of the week were you born?”

The answers are in effect also a password. User feedback on the password recovery feature has been somewhat mixed due to the time required and complexity of the answers.

“The difficulty in setting up password recovery is the number one complaint we get from our users. The irony of it is that this is a piece of functionality that no one else in the Bitcoin space is offering, and it is optional. In other wallets, if you lose a password encryption key, you can’t get into it. We’re not only the first bitcoin wallet to offer this, but the first implementation of data encryption that offers this.”- Puey

It cannot be denied that the questions are difficult, and six is quite a few to keep track of. However, for those new to the Bitcoin space, it will be a comfort that their newly acquired wealth will not only be safe, but always accessible.

Many companies encrypt information once it is stored in a centralized server. Puey says, “It’s like putting a key to your house under the mat.”. Airbitz uses client side encryption, complemented by a decentralized storage architecture and innovative password protection.

With Airbitz the information is encrypted on the user’s device before it’s decentralized on cloud storage. If a storage server goes down, users will still have access to their funds as the encrypted data will have been replicated and be accessible across multiple servers. In addition, Airbitz utilizes decentralized Libbitcoin/Obelisk public bitcoin nodes to send and receive funds. This gives the wallet transactional capability even if Airbitz nodes go offline.

• Hierarchical Deterministic wallets with changing addresses per transaction.
• Local client-side encryption (S-Crypt password hashing & AES256 encryption) of all user keys and data.
• No user info required to use wallet (no name, address, email, or phone number).
• Native C/C++ code for super strong encryption and password hashing (S-Crypt password hashing & AES256 encryption).
• Local client-side encryption using user generated login & password.
  — – Airbitz Privacy and Security

Puey advises that the team at Airbitz are constantly reigning themselves in and keeping focused.

“Our challenge is holding back and staying focused. There are so many exciting things that people want us to do that it’s about deciding what are the strategic things to tackle.” – Puey

The Airbitz User interface is clearly full of rich features, but this is just the hood of the car. Beneath that sparkly metallic layer lies the core library, an engine capable of many feats. For those who enjoy the engine, here is a taste of the potential from Puey.

“There’s a tonne of potential for Airbitz to not just be this beautiful, functional consumer wallet, but actually to be an infrastructure that many other companies utilize. We’ve built a thin UI on top of a fast, cross-platform core library API which can be put into a webserver, an ATM, an exchange, or even a game, and it implements all of our wallet functionality except for the UI. It handles connections to the peer-to-peer decentralized storage, connections to our authentication server, connections to the bitcoin nodes for sending and checking transactions, caching of transaction history, storage and search of transaction data, and client side encryption. All of that in a library that can be put into many other projects.”
— – Puey

Given the multiple layers to Airbitz, it will be interesting to see what the team announces next.

B.Holmes, author of The Range of Illusion and The Private Key instalments, is currently located in Thailand, researching and writing about crypto. You can follow B.Holmes on twitter @BanteringB, or contact via email: [email protected]