One of the drawbacks most people see when thinking of Bitcoin wallets is what to do if they would lose access to their funds. While stolen funds can be impossible to recover, losing access to a wallet due to device failure can be circumvented. Leading Bitcoin wallet provider Airbitz has come up with a foolproof solution to reduce bitcoin losses to a minimum.
A Foolproof Bitcoin Wallet Recovery Feature
There have been several ways to recover a Bitcoin wallet throughout the years. Backing up private keys and importing them in a different client has become a somewhat standard practice. But some providers use 12-word sentences to create a seed for wallet recovery. Both are valid solutions, but not exactly user-friendly.
Password Recovery 2.0 is a new feature recently introduced by the Airbitz team. Recovering forgotten passwords to their private data can be done in a more user-friendly way. Two-factor authentication is used to make this process a lot smoother. Users send their first key to their own email address. Airbitz stores the encrypted second key.
Contrary to what some people may think, both keys are needed to unlock the wallet. In fact, they can only be linked together by going through a recovery question process. Failing to provide the right answers to these questions will result in only having one key. An attractive solution, and one that is commonly used by more mainstream financial service providers as well.
Airbitz CEO Paul Puey explained it as follows:
“We’re excited to solve one of the biggest challenges facing the mass adoption of cryptocurrency. Solving the problem of securely storing bitcoins without having to worry about lost passwords will help bring the bitcoin economy to the 99 percent of humanity who can benefit from this amazing technology and currently is out of the loop.”
Users will get to choose their own questions and answers. A dedicated web URL to the recovery process will be sent to the user’s email address by themselves. This will prevent losing Airbitz wallet access when a device is broken or stolen. Moreover, this solution will also act as a password recovery tool when the user still controls the original device.
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