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paullinator
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I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 2:34 am

Hi all,

I cofounded Airbitz in Jan 2014 with the mission of creating a platform to secure bitcoin and digital assets in not just an easy but also familiar way that is usable to the masses that don't want to deal with the complexity of encryption, backup, or multi-word passphrases. We aim to accomplish this while retaining bitcoin's core advantages of autonomy, privacy, and decentralization.

As soon as I discovered bitcoin, I was immediately addicted to the technology and it's massively disruptive potential. I decided this was the culmination of my experiences in both tech and business.

Happy to be here today answering any questions about myself or Airbitz.

DougScrib
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Donate BTC of your choice to 1KkbqjZRXw8qHTutRXRrmCkp5Y3hKDzvYk

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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 2:48 am

I know I may be hoping for the impossible.... with the Glidera partnership, will a 'buy instant' with a credit card or debit card ever be possible WITHOUT associating a bank account?

paullinator
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 2:57 am

I know I may be hoping for the impossible.... with the Glidera partnership, will a 'buy instant' with a credit card or debit card ever be possible WITHOUT associating a bank account?
Hi Doug. Instant buy is definitely a feature we'd like to offer and we work with our partners to try to encourage that type of usability. The ability to do instant buy is really hinged on being able to reduce fraud which is challenging. We hope that as the service matures and fraud prevention measures improve, that we'd be able to introduce quicker ways to buy bitcoin. However we can't speak for our partners. In the end they are the ones that decide on any type of accelerated buy service and we can only help them by building out the best wallet interface to get them the information they need.

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BitcoinXio
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 3:00 am

Hi Paul, thanks for coming and doing the AMA! Also, congrats on the Glidera integration making your wallet a complete solution.

My question is what new and exciting things is Airbitz working on in the bitcoin space to take things to the next level? Also, is Airbitz working on anything to help with user adoption aside from the wallet (merchants, marketing, education, etc)?

charliem
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 3:18 am

What separates your company from coinbase?

paullinator
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 3:19 am

Hi Paul, thanks for coming and doing the AMA! Also, congrats on the Glidera integration making your wallet a complete solution.

My question is what new and exciting things is Airbitz working on in the bitcoin space to take things to the next level? Also, is Airbitz working on anything to help with user adoption aside from the wallet (merchants, marketing, education, etc)?
Hi BitcoinXIO,

We've got quite a few things in the pipe that will definitely help drive bitcoin adoption amongst the population of people of that don't even care about bitcoin. We fundamentally believe that bitcoin companies need to appeal to people's needs. Ideology only goes so far. To do that we'll be onboarding more buy/sell services to enable more countries and regions to acquire bitcoin. Then we'll be offering cool integrated services inside that app that allow people to use bitcoin in ways fiat just can't handle. :-)

Related to, but not directly utilizing bitcoin, we're also pushing the concept of Edge Security to help users secure data, other digital assets, and even private keys for authentication on their own device using a zero-knowledge, almost-zero-trust architecture. We're super excited about the potential of public/private key authentication so we've put in support for BitID into our platform.

BitID uses private keys for bitcoin to authenticate users to websites. We encourage all webservice owners to incorporate BitID as a method of authentication as it provides not just a more secure method of authentication but also a more user friendly method as well. Airbitz, Mycelium, and Ledger all support BitID to let users authenticate with supporting websites.

BitID could be the movement that puts a bitcoin wallet into the hands of millions of people that just want a more secure and easier way to authenticate. Then we can more easily get bitcoin into their hands.

paullinator
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 3:31 am

What separates your company from coinbase?
Hi Charlie,

Airbitz is a fully private, zero-knowledge, autonomous software application that allows users to send, secure, and receive bitcoin with no 3rd party. Users of Airbitz fully control their private keys and do not even need Airbitz the company in order to send or receive value. The Airbitz software on their phone directly connects to bitcoin nodes and multiple 3rd party APIs to provide bitcoin functionality. Since Airbitz does not hold user funds, all funds in a user's Airbitz wallet are available to spend at the user's discretion.

In contrast, most "hosted" bitcoin accounts like Coinbase only hold a small percentage of total user funds in hot storage. Therefore a few users on the service could easily spend all available hot storage funds rendering all other users unable to spend until hot storage funds are reloaded from cold storage.

In addition, since we do not hold or transmit funds, we do not have the capability nor the requirement (at this time) to censor transactions the way hosted accounts do.

Access to our integrated buy/sell services does require users to expose personal info to those partners. However, only those partners see their info, not Airbitz. And once bitcoin is purchased, it is received into their Airbitz wallet where they fully control their funds and privacy. This is in stark contrast to the hosted bitcoin accounts.

We believe in the many benefits that bitcoin brings to the financial system, and we've enabled the full spectrum of those advantages while keeping the familiarity of mobile banking.

karibou
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 4:08 am

Hello,

Is buy/sell bitcoin feature only available for latest ios version?

If i remember correct your wallet was the one in the Morgan Spurlock documentary. Morgan was confirming payment with a little "chip" where can i get this?

Can i recover my airbitz wallet if one day airbitz servers are gone for good? If yes how?


Have you already started to work with maidsafe and what are your future plan?


Thank you

psilyrabbit
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 4:27 am

Hey Paul,

What's the most bitcoins you'd carry in an Airbitz wallet?

Since user friendliess is a big part of your competitive advantage, are there plans for a cold storage solution with Airbitz-like simplicity in the pipeline?

Thanks

mlangley
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 5:08 am

Thanks for making Airbitz open source. What services or apps would you like to see developers working on utilizing your API?

paullinator
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 5:21 am

Hey Paul,

What's the most bitcoins you'd carry in an Airbitz wallet?

Since user friendliess is a big part of your competitive advantage, are there plans for a cold storage solution with Airbitz-like simplicity in the pipeline?

Thanks
Let's just say I have carried easily 20% of my net worth in Airbitz. I think a dollar value is less important to consider than the relative value it represents for an individual.

We do aim to provide "vault caliber" security solutions but I think hardware wallets represent usability to only a small percentage of the population. I think the masses will use hardened device security in combination with multi signature oracles to achieve comparable security to offline hardware wallets while being usable to the masses. As those solutions become available we'll be implementing them.

paullinator
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 5:51 am

Hello,

Is buy/sell bitcoin feature only available for latest ios version?

If i remember correct your wallet was the one in the Morgan Spurlock documentary. Morgan was confirming payment with a little "chip" where can i get this?

Can i recover my airbitz wallet if one day airbitz servers are gone for good? If yes how?


Have you already started to work with maidsafe and what are your future plan?


Thank you
The buy/sell feature is available in our latest iOS and Android apps.

It wasn't the Airbitz wallet featured in the Morgan Spurlock documentary. We actually hadn't released our wallet yet at the time the doc was filmed. We'd be happy to supply Morgan his next mobile wallet for his second documentary though! :)

Once you've created a wallet, the private keys exist on your device and the Airbitz app can send out the funds even if Airbitz is down since it talks directly to the bitcoin network and 3rd party APIs. Logging into the app does not require Airbitz servers on devices that have logged into the account prior. Airbitz servers are only a backup of your data and to provide some conveniences such as PIN based login. You can also extract out the master private seed from the app and use a separate recovery tool to sweep out the funds.

We fundamentally believe in a decentralized architecture as much as we can implement it while providing a strong level of usability. We think we've achieved this with Airbitz. We have not yet utilized Maidsafe but I think it could achieve some amazing benefits for file system storage of our user data that reduces cost and reliability. I look forward to seeing it go into production.

paullinator
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 5:59 am

Thanks for making Airbitz open source. What services or apps would you like to see developers working on utilizing your API?
We are super excited to see a new generation of zero-knowledge, private apps utilize the Airbitz Edge Security platform. I'm especially excited to see Bitcoin/Crypto "2.0", blockchain technology apps build on Ethereum, Augur, Factom, Counterparty, Open Bazaar and the like utilizing Airbitz to secure the private keys and any relevant data for those platforms. In talks with developers in the Crypto 2.0 / Smart contract space, we've realized that most of them have neglected the security of private keys and user data as they have different problems that they aim to solve. We believe as these projects gain traction and importance, private security, especially 'ease of security' will become paramount and I look forward to having them utilize Airbitz to solve that problem.

In addition, we see huge potential in applying Airbitz security to applications such as Quickbooks, IOT devices, medical record management, private communications, personal info management, and a slew of other use cases.

DarthCoin
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 10:50 am

Hey, I love Airbitz and I use it from the beginning. But never could import the keys into an Electrum or other desktop wallet. I use different mobile wallets for convenience and also I like to have them backed up into an Electrum/desktop wallet. In this way I can have access anytime anywhere to my coins.
Do you have a guide of step by step import Airbitz wallet into Electrum ?
Thanks and great work with Airbitz!

paullinator
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 5:23 pm

Hey, I love Airbitz and I use it from the beginning. But never could import the keys into an Electrum or other desktop wallet. I use different mobile wallets for convenience and also I like to have them backed up into an Electrum/desktop wallet. In this way I can have access anytime anywhere to my coins.
Do you have a guide of step by step import Airbitz wallet into Electrum ?
Thanks and great work with Airbitz!
Hello DarthCoin,

At this time, Airbitz only lets users export the master private seed in a raw entropy format. It unfortunately doesn't support the BIP39 mnemonic format used by Electrum as it was developed before that was standardized. We do have on the roadmap to support BIP39 but it will only support newer wallets created within accounts. You can take the master seed and write it down or encrypt it in a file for desktop storage if you choose.

If you only use the desktop wallets for backup, rest assured that the Airbitz wallet is already backed up for you, and that your device is a backup of Airbitz servers. We've designed the app so that it can fully function to send out funds even if Airbitz servers go down. Once you've logged in once, the keys will live encrypted on your device and you can always "login" with your username & password even while offline. Our servers are really just a backup in case you lose your phone. And your phone is a backup in case Airbitz servers are down.

Thanks for the support
Paul

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Skin_in_the_game
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 7:22 pm

Hello Paul,

I'm re-reading Antifragile by iconoclast thinker Nassim Taleb these days. He writes
"Never ask anyone for their opinion [...] Just ask them what they have -or don't have- in their portfolio"
Having met or read about a few people in the bitcoin community, I have come to think it's a very relevant question and you can better weight their opinions having an idea of how much Bitcoin if any at all they hold.

2 examples:
Someone can be very critical of Bitcoins while holding a lot
Someone can advocate for this or that concerning Bitcoins or declaring it the future while not holding any.
But there are many other configurations.

Anyway I decided to create this account today. sad I didn't do it at the start of these AMA. But from now on I will ask every participants to tell us a range of their bitcoins holdings rather than asking them their opinion on Bitcoin and its future.

So my question is:

Can you tell me the number of Bitcoins you own today?
a/ <10
b/ 10-100
c/ 100-1,000
d/1,000-10,000
e/10,000-100,000
f/more than 100,000

paullinator
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 7:59 pm

Hello Paul,

I'm re-reading Antifragile by iconoclast thinker Nassim Taleb these days. He writes
"Never ask anyone for their opinion [...] Just ask them what they have -or don't have- in their portfolio"
Having met or read about a few people in the bitcoin community, I have come to think it's a very relevant question and you can better weight their opinions having an idea of how much Bitcoin if any at all they hold.

2 examples:
Someone can be very critical of Bitcoins while holding a lot
Someone can advocate for this or that concerning Bitcoins or declaring it the future while not holding any.
But there are many other configurations.

Anyway I decided to create this account today. sad I didn't do it at the start of these AMA. But from now on I will ask every participants to tell us a range of their bitcoins holdings rather than asking them their opinion on Bitcoin and its future.

So my question is:

Can you tell me the number of Bitcoins you own today?
a/ <10
b/ 10-100
c/ 100-1,000
d/1,000-10,000
e/10,000-100,000
f/more than 100,000
As I had mentioned in a previous question, I think the number of bitcoin or even fiat worth of bitcoin is not a relevant figure to ask people since it doesn't clearly state their true commitment or "skin in the game". If I said I had 1000 bitcoin but my net worth was $50 billion USD, well, then the 1000 BTC is a drop in the bucket. But to a person that maybe earns $100k or less per year with only $100k in the bank, then that 1000 BTC is a huge commitment. I prefer to quote my bitcoin commitment in percent of networth or liquid assets.

With that said, I hold about 80% of my liquid assets (cash, stocks, precious metal, equivalent) in bitcoin and about 25% of my net worth in bitcoin. Hope that helps.

psilyrabbit
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 9:04 pm

What's your take on the Lightning network?
Will Airbitz be able to run seamlessly w it?
Your opinion on altcoins or side chains?

And since it's being asked a lot, your thoughts on the block size debate?

paullinator
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Thu Nov 19, 2015 11:52 pm

What's your take on the Lightning network?
Will Airbitz be able to run seamlessly w it?
Your opinion on altcoins or side chains?

And since it's being asked a lot, your thoughts on the block size debate?
We're super excited about the Lightning network and other payment channel proposals. Airbitz should actually be one of the few wallets that work well with it. Unlike on-chain transactions, the Lightning network requires recipients to hold and secure data for each transaction, for some amount of time. Loss of that data could mean loss of funds. This means that wallets that utilize a 12-24 word backup will no longer be sufficient to truly back up a users funds. Airbitz saw the advantage of providing encrypted, backed up, and synchronized data for the wallet. This allows us to secure Lightning network transactions in ways most other wallets can't.

WRT the blocksize debate. I do believe that the block size will have to increase at some point in time. While we don't fundamentally agree with Bitcoin XT, I'm happy that it exists and like that the developers pushed forward to release it. I believe this finally gave miners a choice of what to run. Prior to this, they only had the option of Bitcoin Core x.xx or upgrade to Bitcoin Core x.xx + 1. Like political parties, now they have a different option. Hopefully in the future they will have more than two much like I'd like to have more than two political parties where I live (US).

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Allen
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Tue Dec 08, 2015 11:38 am

any chance of implementing watch-only addresses in the future?

jesus4736
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Wed Dec 06, 2017 10:34 am

Dear Paul,

I tried to withdraw my bitcoins but i can not send 0,28 BTC, 3.000,00 € aprox.

Could you please tell me whats going on?

I can not understand that 3 thousand € are dust…

Thanks.
Attachments
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my funds
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Message from the wallet app

CryptoForTrade
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Fri Feb 02, 2018 11:24 am

You founded Airbitz. What was your bigest chalenge

CryptoBeans
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Sat Feb 17, 2018 9:39 pm

You are my idol

zoneforcrypto
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Re: I'm Paul Puey, CEO / Co-Founder of Airbitz. Ask me anything!

Mon Mar 05, 2018 5:01 pm

What do you think about crypto future

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