Cointext and Handcash: New Wallets for Bitcoin Cash!

Bitcoin Cash has inspired two developer teams to develop new wallets. Cointext wants to send Bitoin Cash via SMS and Handcash implements NFC payments as well as an interesting concept to replace addresses with names.

If you feel the irresistible urge to yell "bcash", "cheat" and "Roger Ver" at Bitcoin Cash, please stop reading the article here. You can jump directly to the comments and smear there the obligatory insult.

For all the others who are following the development of Bitcoin Cash with the same curiosity as me, I have two interesting wallet projects here, which underline Bitcoin Cash's claim to be a digital means of payment for everyone and everthing: Cointext and Handcash. Both bring two types of payment into the crypto world, which have largely been missing.

Cointext:

Cointext recently announced that it will be beta testing in March. The Wallet intends to make it possible to send Bitcoin Cash by SMS by entering certain keywords into the short messages. It is not necessary to be connected to the Internet, to use a smartphone or to set up an account or passwords.

Check Your Balance
Text the word BALANCE to CoinText

Add Funds
Text the word DEPOSIT to CoinText

Send BCH to a Phone Number
Text the word "SEND" space "$amount” space "your friend's cell
number" to CoinText.

Withdraw BCH to External Wallet
Text the word "WITHDRAW" space "$amount” space "your external BCH
address" to CoinText

Chef developer Vin Armani advertises Cointext as "a wallet for those who do not have a bank account". Especially in some developing countries such a wallet could be very useful. But it could also make it easier to use Bitcoin Cash, especially if you're on the road and you do not have good internet everywhere. "Our SMS wallet also allows mobile phone users to protect their savings discreetly from the depreciation of national currencies and more. We will also develop a complete set of tools for which transactions via SMS are necessary or helpful ... "

But how does Cointext want to send Bitcoin Cash via SMS? And is not that terribly unsafe? The white paper explains that each complete phone number leads to a single mobile device. Cointext uses this number to identify users and pushes them through a secret algorithm. Its result is then the seed for the Bitcoin Cash key pair, which is never stored but always recreated. An API server then reads the SMS, forms the private key from the phone number, but only retains the information in the cache, and then sends the transaction to the Bitcoin Cash blockchain.

The concept is clever and certainly an idea that can be followed up. But you do not really have to explain that there are many security holes. Someone gets access to the phone, whether direct or virtual, and he already has your coins. Worse, the algorithm has a bug, and somebody finds out how to abuse it and steals lots of coins. Or someone even hacks the server of Cointext, where he finds the secret algorithm, which allows him to use a bot to search all possible phone numbers for coins.

Cointext would be much more convincing, if in the quite attractive setup still a password, or at least a PIN, would be integrated. But even so, it can serve its purpose if you do not want a vault, but need a temporary, convenient, easy, and globally available vehicle for digital coins. Safety is always a matter of relation.

Cointext would be much more convincing, if in the quite attractive setup still a password, or at least a PIN, would be integrated. But even so, it can serve its purpose if you do not want a vault, but need a temporary, convenient, easy, and globally available vehicle for digital coins. Safety is always a matter of relation.

Handcash:

For Handcash you can already download the beta version in the Appstore for Android devices. Handcash is one of the first SPV wallets to enable payments through NFC, Near Field Communication. Modern smartphones have this feature, and more and more supermarket cashiers can pay for it. Simply hold the smartphone to the cash register, and the payment is already completed.

You do not really have to explain why NFC can make paying with a smartphone even easier. In addition, Handcash also tries to make it easier to use Bitcoin Cash on several levels. For example, they have developed a feature called "Cashtags," which you can use instead of addresses to send funds. Unlike previous attempts to replace the somewhat cumbersome addresses, a cash tag is not connected to an address, but to the ID of a smartphone. Cashtag even helps to improve privacy by acting like a Reusable Payment Code or Stealth Address.

In addition, the wallet developers promise a "one-tab-backup". The wallet file is encrypted and saved with the cashtag stored on the user's Google Drive folder. All he has to do is wipe the screen. "If you use a Google account, you've already logged in to your phone. This means that if you change your phone, you can still recover your wallet and reinstall Handcash, "explains one of the developers.

Conclusion

As I said both wallets are still beta. They are not a technological breakthrough, but show what you can do when you creatively connect phones and an open blockchain network. Both may not be perfect for protecting a treasure of digital gold from all the potential attacks. Rather, they are trying to make digital payments with Bitcoin Cash as easy, fluid and fast as possible. In the case of Handcash, the developers have also introduced an interesting backup concept.

Overall, they do not orient these two wallets to dogmas for safety, but try to find an individual balance between security and usability, and like Cointext they are also willing to sacrifice security for new use cases.

Thus, the two wallets probably also illustrate the difference between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. That there are more and more wallets using Bitcoin Cash exclusively is, by the way, an interesting development that I did not expect.

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Here you have the post as an audio edition:

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Image Sources:

• Post header created by myself
• https://cointext.io/uploads/whitepaper.pdf
• play.google.com/store

Video source:

• http://handcash.io/

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Have a nice day!

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