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BitcoinPoint

Latest release: 5.1 ( 28th May 2022 ) 🔍 Last analysed 17th November 2021 . Custodial: The provider holds the keys
4 ★★★★★
22 ratings
15th August 2018

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Do your own research!

Try out searching for "lost bitcoins", "stole my money" or "scammers" together with the wallet's name, even if you think the wallet is generally trustworthy. For all the bigger wallets you will find accusations. Make sure you understand why they were made and if you are comfortable with the provider's reaction.

If you find something we should include, you can create an issue or edit this analysis yourself and create a merge request for your changes.

The Analysis 

(Analysis from Android review)

Update 2022-04-25: This app is not available anymore.

App Description

BitcoinPoint is the only machine-less solution to buy Bitcoin through a network of agents in the UK and the first company to implement Open Banking to buy Bitcoin directly.

BitcoinPoint is also allowing registered users to sell bitcoin and withdraw cash to the largest ATM network in the UK with 18,000 ATMs! (cashzone.co.uk)

Summary

  • Buy in stores with cash.
  • Buy online by safely connecting to your bank account.
  • Buy small amounts (from £5 online and £20 in stores)
  • Directly top up a Bitcoin Blockchain wallet (cold storage,…)
  • Access your BitcoinPoint Online wallet and send your bitcoin in the future where you’d like.
  • Add as many Bitcoin Blockchain wallets as you wish.
  • Secure instantaneous transactions for the Online BitcoinPoint wallet top up
  • Fast and secure transaction for other Bitcoin wallets (transactions are pending in the Blockchain after few seconds!)
  • Dynamic map with information on each retailer.
  • Main UK Banks are listed for fast bank transfer (Open Banking).
  • A dynamic bitcoin rate to monitor the price change of bitcoin.
  • Last but not least, you can send your bitcoin to any email address! The owner of the email address will simply need to download the BitcoinPoint App to automatically access the bitcoin sent and use them.

These are the ways to withdraw Bitcoin from the BitcoinPoint wallet:

  1. Bank
  2. ATM
  3. Another Bitcoin wallet or BitcoinPoint user

Third-Party Media Mentions

Decrypt Media reports on BitcoinPoint about their partnership with ATM operator Cash Zone. This would allow bitcoin holders to cash out via its network of ATMs.

The App

The first screen informed us to “scan a wallet to directly transact with it. It then asked us to provide a mobile phone number. The OTP SMS verification did not arrive.

Legal information and specifics could be found in this document (PDF).

Cold Storage

All of our Online Wallets are on Cold Storage which means that their private keys are not on the internet.

Verdict

The wallets are purportedly kept offline in cold storage and there is no evidence of private keys being provided to the user. In this case, it appears as though BitcoinPoint is a custodial service. This makes the app not verifiable.

(dg)

Verdict Explained

As the provider of this product holds the keys, verifiability of the product is not relevant to the security of the funds!

As part of our Methodology, we ask:

Custodial!

Is the product self-custodial?

If the answer is "no", we mark it as "Custodial: The provider holds the keys".

A custodial service is a service where the funds are held by a third party like the provider. The custodial service can at any point steal all the funds of all the users at their discretion. Our investigations stop there.

Some services might claim their setup is super secure, that they don’t actually have access to the funds, or that the access is shared between multiple parties. For our evaluation of it being a wallet, these details are irrelevant. They might be a trustworthy Bitcoin bank and they might be a better fit for certain users than being your own bank but our investigation still stops there as we are only interested in wallets.

Products that claim to be non-custodial but feature custodial accounts without very clearly marking those as custodial are also considered “custodial” as a whole to avoid misguiding users that follow our assessment.

This verdict means that the provider might or might not publish source code and maybe it is even possible to reproduce the build from the source code but as it is custodial, the provider already has control over the funds, so it is not a wallet where you would be in exclusive control of your funds.

We have to acknowledge that a huge majority of Bitcoiners are currently using custodial Bitcoin banks. If you do, please:

  • Do your own research if the provider is trust-worthy!
  • Check if you know at least enough about them so you can sue them when you have to!
  • Check if the provider is under a jurisdiction that will allow them to release your funds when you need them?
  • Check if the provider is taking security measures proportional to the amount of funds secured? If they have a million users and don’t use cold storage, that hot wallet is a million times more valuable for hackers to attack. A million times more effort will be taken by hackers to infiltrate their security systems.
The product cannot be independently verified. If the provider puts your funds at risk on purpose or by accident, you will probably not know about the issue before people start losing money. If the provider is more criminally inclined he might have collected all the backups of all the wallets, ready to be emptied at the press of a button. The product might have a formidable track record but out of distress or change in management turns out to be evil from some point on, with nobody outside ever knowing before it is too late.