Douglas Bakkum: Building Bitcoin Hardware Wallets to Empower Individuals
Ep. 77

Douglas Bakkum: Building Bitcoin Hardware Wallets to Empower Individuals

Episode description

My guest is Douglas Bakkum. He is the Co-Founder and CEO of the Swiss hardware wallet manufacturer Shift Crypto. Douglas holds a Phd in neuroscience and shifted his career from starting a scientific research lab in academia to building a hardware wallet manufacturer at a time, when no hardware wallets existed on the market. Douglas saw a problem and the need for a solution and started the company together with bitcoin core maintainer Jonas Schnelli in 2015.

Shift Crypto is one of my sponsors, and after this conversation I have to say I am even more impressed with their work. The BitBox02 has some additional features that set it apart from the other hardware wallets in the market. Like the dual-chip approach. I did not know how that works before and as I want to have a general understanding of the concepts, his explanations strengthened my trust in this new technology even more.

Topics:

  • Robotics and artificial intelligence
  • Parallels between academia and the start-up world
  • Neuroscience, the brain and artificial intelligence
  • Stress and routines to stay stable
  • Launching SHIFT Crypto
  • Trusting new technologies Bitcoin self-reliance, privacy and freedom - How SHIFT handles user-data
  • Gaining privacy with your hardware wallet
  • Apple as tollgate
  • What is more secure: using a hardware wallet on the desktop or on a mobile?
  • How are hardware wallets more secure than software wallets?
  • Paper wallets
  • What is the dual-chip approach of the BitBox02 and how does it compare with Trezor and Ledger?
  • What he would put on a giant ad on social media

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