These arrived from crypto-cards.com yesterday, and they’re fairly delightful: metal cold-storage wallets with the address and encrypted key laser-etched into the anodized surface.
They’re light, sized like business cards and easy to tuck into a wallet, or hide away somewhere. They’re not going to burn and they’re not going to rust, so it seems like they’d last just about forever.
What makes them brilliant, though, is the use of BIP38-encrypted private keys. This is great in several ways:
It’s ok that a third party is manufacturing your wallet for you, because they never handle your actual keys, only your encrypted key. You generate it yourself using something like this, then just send the already-encrypted key and corresponding address to the manufacturer
You can carry it around with you, and not worry about someone accidentally photographing the key (or stealing it) because, again — encrypted. Then you can use something like Mycelium to spend from cold storage and decrypt on the fly.
As a bonus, if you do lose it, you’ve already created a backup just through the process of ordering, assuming you save the encrypted key somewhere at that point. So, worst case scenario, you can recover the funds that way.
When you think about how complicated a secure wallet project could be, it’s hard not to be impressed with what an elegant and inexpensive solution these metal cards represent.
Now I want a blue one.
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