At BitPay, we are strong proponents of individual privacy and control over one's own bitcoin holdings. Open, resilient financial systems are absolutely critical to growth and development, and bitcoin makes entirely new levels of financial security possible.
We've never been fans of bitcoin banks or other services which require users to surrender their bitcoin holdings in exchange for an account balance on that service. The fundamental innovation of Bitcoin is that it allows anyone, anywhere in the world, to securely hold and transfer their own assets, without trusting a third party.
Among others, BitGo has built an online bitcoin wallet service using multi-signature technology, or simply "multi-sig". An example multi-sig wallet might store bitcoin assets in an address which contains 3 keys, and require 2 of the 3 keys to transfer the funds.
BitGo's service keeps one key to your multi-sig address, and you as the account owner have the other 2 keys. You can store one of your keys in a safe or a safety deposit box, or give it to a trusted friend or attorney, which you would only need in case of emergency.
As you can imagine, this enables a future where no single entity can compromise your financial freedom.
When you are logged in to BitGo and authenticated, you can present your main key and BitGo has one key, so your funds can be moved very quickly. If the BitGo service were ever offline, you could retrieve your backup key from your safe and use it, combined with your primary key, to move your funds.
BitGo is also contributing to Bitcore, an open-source javascript library for bitcoin applications that we recently launched. We are excited to welcome their contributions to making Bitcoin the most open, powerful, and secure payment system in the world.
BitGo is founded by experienced developers and entrepreneurs, and we are happy to recommend their multi-sig wallet to all consumers, merchants, and organizations that want the best combination of security and convenience around their bitcoin holdings.
