Bitcoin wallet Apple

Above, a gentleman who was unhappy with Apple's decision to remove the Blockchain bitcoin wallet from the iTunes App Store shot holes through his iPhone with a rifle.

• Boing Boing presents a guest op-ed from the the Chief Security Officer of Blockchain, a Bitcoin wallet app recently removed from Apple's App Store.

On Wednesday February 5th, Apple yanked Blockchain, the last remaining bitcoin wallet from the App Store without notice, firmly establishing iOS as the bitcoin-hostile mobile operating system. In a terse email to the app’s developers, Apple cited an “unresolved issue”, without any further explanation. While Blockchain’s developers scrambled to get clarification, it appears the unresolved issue is that the application is a bitcoin wallet, something that cannot be “resolved.” Blockchain was the last of the bitcoin wallets, the others yanked months ago by Apple’s innovation gatekeepers.

Meanwhile, across the mobile market divide, Google’s Android OS is quite bitcoin friendly. More than a hundred bitcoin related apps, including a dozen different wallets, compete for attention in a crowded market. Clearly, Apple’s “unresolved issue” is not related to bitcoin’s legality, which has been firmly established in the US and almost all other jurisdictions. Presumably, Google’s lawyers arrived at the same conclusion as US law enforcement agencies and the Financial Crime Enforcement Network (FinCEN) in the United States, that the use of bitcoin is perfectly legal.

So if legality is not the problem, what is?

Apple’s walled garden has always been touted as a means to ensure a safe and high quality, consistent experience for its users. The blockchain app had built a solid user base with more than 120, 000 downloads and high ratings over two years. Apple had offered no warning or expressed any concern over the safety or quality of the application. Rather, it seems to have simply missed the application in its review process and just belatedly decided to drop the hammer once it was noticed.

The reaction by bitcoin’s iPhone users was both furious and at times quite funny. One reddit user offered Nexus 5 Android phones to anyone who would demonstrate their ire by destroying their iPhone in protest, in the most spectacular way. Many raced to compete, creating hilarious entries with titles such as “blunt object” and “second story window” to document their chosen means of iPhone destruction. The top prize however must go to the reddit user “dieselgeek, ” a firearms reviewer who reports under the name R3 or “Ryan’s Range Report” who drove out to the middle of a snow covered firing range to put three bullets into his iPhone at 300 yards with a high-powered sniper rifle. [See video, above.]