Ai-Fi Counterseal

Bitcoin hacking has grown into a daunting criminal enterprise because if the private keys of your Bitcoin coins are compromised, the attackers can steal all your coins without leaving much trace. As the famous expression goes, *Not your Keys, Not your Coins*.

The following crypto-related entities are considered vulnerable to criminal attacks:
1. All the private keys of your crypto coins in your crypto wallets: Hardware wallets or key vaults are considered better options than keeping them on soft wallets running on a PC or portable device of questionable safety.
2. The recovery seeds of your wallets: This hot potato is almost always written down and placed in a hopefully inconspicuous drawer or bank vault.
3. Confidentiality and privacy regarding the transactions of your crypto coins
The first 2 entities are fairly straightforward to understand the criticality of their protection as their compromise would spell the total loss of your valuable assets. Most hardware wallets aim to solve the protection of the first, while the second one is getting less attention, which is odd considering its devastating consequence if happened. The entity 3 is less obvious but has increasingly become a concern. For some people entity 3 is the all consuming issue at the top of their priority list.
The nomenclature "counterseal" used here simply indicates the arrangement that two independent "signers" are required to create a single Bitcoin transaction signature. It is not based on the popular multi-signature scheme producing multiple signatures, but an application of the latest "Threshold Signature" technology to the "Ai-Fi Counterseal Wallet". It is the modern software realization of the old counterseal method with the added advantage of placing those two logical seals separately and independently in order to avoid single points of failure. In the context of the cryptography, the individual "seal" is implemented by a pair of crypto key "shares" each consisting of a private and a public components. The components of all linked seals jointly produce the public key for a single wallet account, whereas the private key shares remain physically distributed over multiple devices without ever needing to be joined for producing the private key. Those private keys or key components are therefore never exposed simultaneously and used only for producing "signature shares", which are pieced together at the end of signing rounds to create the transaction signatures for the wallet. Otherwise put, the private keys in a Counterseal Wallet is nowhere to be retrieved or stolen and signatures are rendered without the need to explicitly reproduce the private keys.
On the other hand the Hardware Wallet may be considered as the ancient single seal solution prior to the invention of the "counterseal" with all the perils in trusting a single piece of hardware. Among all the risks in relying on a single implement for secret hiding, the possible loss event of the hardware is the most severe. Additionally, although the recovery seed of the complete hardware wallet may be exported for recovery purposes, it is still also embedded in the wallet which may be exploited when the attacker manages to get their hands on the hardware wallet. As an answer to those issues, the counterseal scheme splits the key vault into multiple implements to avoid the potentially catastrophic event when the only hardware is compromised.
The interface between the Counterseal signers and the front-end wallet (Electrum) is air-gapped.
In addition to the air-gapped design, to further eliminate the threat of malware, the Counterseal Primary Signer runs on the personal with critical key materials stored in the hardware keychain. The Counterseal Secondary Signer may be hosted on a USB stick running live Linux with no persistent storage and storing all critical key materials on the Ai-Fi Incognito Cloud.