Bitlox reached out to me and asked if they could send me one of their hardware wallets to look at. I asked for two, so I could tear one apart and have one for not tearing apart. The two Bitlox wallets arrived the other day. They sent these to me for no cost, and I made no promises about the content I post about their product. Nobody reviews or approves my content before I post it.

I wouldn't use a Bitlox.

There are several reasons, but the first reason trumps all others, and that's because it is not open source. The firmware is not available, and even after ripping one apart, I still do not know what hardware makes it tick. I'll get back to that in a moment.

Any closed source hardware/software wallet is a non-starter for me (and should be for you). If I'm interested in Bitcoin enough to purchase a dedicated device to store them, then I likely care about Bitcoin's open-source nature. Unreproducable solutions need not apply. Open source money wants to live in open source hardware.

Therefore this post is a 'first impressions' of the Bitlox hardware alone, and I'm unlikely to spend any time with the software used to interact with the Bitlox device to make a well-informed follow-up on the software components.

There's still enough to talk about: