New credit card-sized wallet from Verso provides extreme protection for the users Bitcoin.
There is a good saying that revenge is a dish better served cold. Well, cryptocommunity has an answer for that: Bitcoin is currency better stored cold. For those of our readers that just got into the whole thing, I’ll spend some time on terminology.
Cold storage means disconnected from the Internet and does not require energy to be kept or more precise, that by no digital means one could get his hands inside your wallet. Usually, it can be hard drive, flash drive in a form of a bunny or simply a piece of paper written in your own handwriting. As long as the private key cannot be obtained or intercepted via World Wide Web, your coins are in a cold storage.
Now we can speak more about the product that was spat onto the market just a few days ago – Verso Card. If it wasn’t for QR code on the front and a heavily encrypted private key of your digital wallet, one wouldn’t even look at it. As you might have guessed, the QR is responsible for your public key, so anyone can throw you Bitcoin by scanning it, no surprises here. The back of a card does not have anything out of this world on the first sight either. There it is – your own private key. No, this is your military-grade AEG-256 algorithm two-layer 500 iteration encrypted private key. More reassuring, isn’t it?
That said, the company’s priority is security. To use the card one would require a smartphone running on iOS or Android (Windows Phone is coming soon) with a QR code scanner and the Verso Wallet App installed on it. So this is it – you scan your private key on the back of the card, enter your password and you are in. Now you can fully work with you Bitcoin wallet.
Not much of an innovation, true. However, the policy of the Verso Card is that private key is only known by the user, it sent anywhere and it generated on the client side the moment one makes a purchase of the card. The encryption ties it to the user password. So, your password is the key to the QR code which itself serves as the private key to your wallet. Sounds easy, not having in mind layers of encryption between the two keys.
So, if the perpetrator wants to do something with your wallet, he has to know your password (hope it’s not “qwerty”, “password12345” or any of this nonsense) and actually have your card in their hands and that it is not what most hackers would do. Unless of course you have millions lying there.
There are two versions of the card – Silver and Gold. The former is what I have been describing so far. The latter is on its way to release. Verso Gold goes into an overkill mode when things consider security. It has your wallet cut into small pieces and shuffled on the different Swiss bank accounts, so in the case of losing the card one could restore the digital version. Oh, and if that was not enough, an additional authentication layer is implemented, adding to the total protection a nice brute-force-proof shield. It also looks neater.
The Verso Card is being shipped to any country or region that has a post office. For such high level of defense against digital stealing cost is purely symbolic - $16. What can I say – a nice way to keep your money cold and cool.