This Chip Turns a Dumb Phone Into a Bitcoin Wallet

Published at: April 23, 2015

BitSIM is a small, dual-chip overlay that is physically placed atop a phone's regular SIM card. Once there, the BitSIM turns that phone – even if it's a “dumb” phone – into a Bitcoin wallet.

It does so by submitting transactions to the Bitcoin network as encrypted text messages. The phone owner's private key – stored in the BitSIM overlay – is unlocked with a PIN.

Founder Leon-Gerard Vandenberg says that BitSIM “interposes SIM commands between the original SIM and the phone. So the phone thinks there's a SIM there, and the original SIM thinks there's a phone there – it's a SIM port redirector for SIM commands.”

BitSIM is privately raising funds for its first production run with a crowdsale through Seedco.in. They hope to have a product to ship by Christmas.

Vandenberg recently said in an interview with Brave New Coin:

“Anything running on top of the Bitcoin protocol is also within the reach of BitSIM users, such as Counterparty assets or via ChromaWallet. On a smartphone BitSIM would cooperate with the HIVE wallet and their full Hive app store as well, which expands services. So BitSIM is a platform [where] it will be possible for a BitSIM developer community to evolve, supporting that ecosystem.”

BitSIM's first outreaches will take place in Australia, China and Africa. Vandenberg then hopes to move to India, Canada, the Phillippines and Mexico. Vandenberg finished his Brave New Coin interview by saying:

“We will not be offering our services to the USA because of NY State’s pending Bit-license and its sheer stupidity. The potential use of long arm statutes for piercing jurisdictional boundaries, that BitSIM may operate within, makes not only NY State a no-go, but other states too.”

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