For those unfamiliar, a primer: cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, work on the basis of a distributed ledger system known as the blockchain – a highly-secure database, effectively, which is shared between nodes and which cannot be faked or edited once committed. When you “have Bitcoins” in a “wallet,” what you actually have is the private key required to make transactions on the blockchain to move the coins you own from place to place.
The drawback of this approach compared to cold hard cash is that it becomes impossible to make secure off-chain transactions: you can save your keys to a flash drive, write them in an email, or even print them out and hand them to someone in person, but if you kept a copy it’s perfectly possible for you to transfer the coins to a different “wallet” out from under the recipient’s nose.
The Opendime aims to resolve this. Looking like a denuded flash drive itself, the Opendime is a smart self-contained microcomputer which performs the generation of private keys internally and locks them away – meaning it can receive Bitcoins but not spend them, until such a time as the private key is unlocked by popping a small surface-mount resistor off the board with a physical pin. In other words: if you receive an Opendime which reports it is still sealed, you are guaranteed to be the only person with access to that private key.
Sadly, since penning the relatively-positive review, I’ve encountered a major problem with the Opendime: having carried one on a keyring for a month or so, it spontaneously unsealed itself without the resistor being touched. Support from Coinkite has proven non-existent, and at £15 landed a piece with a minimum order of three units the Opendime is now an expensive but useless trinket while I find myself unable to trust the remaining two in the pack.
The review can be read in full within the magazine itself, which is available in print at all good newsagents and supermarkets and as a free digital download under the Creative Commons licence at HackSpace’s official website.