Hello, thanks for creating Armory looks pretty damn good so far. I wanted to try it out because I am looking for a bit more freedom than the standard client provides and it seems like the software is getting more secure. I have two questions:
1) How would you rate security (i the sense of absence of bugs which could cause a user to lose money) in relation to the default client? I am contemplating which client to use for Walets containing the majority of my Bitcoins
2) I have created a new wallet and made a digital backup. Am I correct in understanding that this backup will be sufficient always and never has to be recreated due to the deterministic nature of the armory wallets? (For the default client I have recreated my backups monthly to avoid losing coins sent to newly generated addresses).
Thank you
1) How would you rate security (i the sense of absence of bugs which could cause a user to lose money) in relation to the default client? I am contemplating which client to use for Walets containing the majority of my Bitcoins
2) I have created a new wallet and made a digital backup. Am I correct in understanding that this backup will be sufficient always and never has to be recreated due to the deterministic nature of the armory wallets? (For the default client I have recreated my backups monthly to avoid losing coins sent to newly generated addresses).
Thank you
Hi watchwood,
(1) So far, even while Armory has been in alpha for six months, I have received no reports of anyone losing money with Armory. Ever. I spent days testing and ironing out the wallets when I started, and there's never been a hint of a problem! Even I am impressed that the wallets have been so reliable through the infancy of the program.
--Offline wallets are the holy grail feature, and they work. Even though they use USB keys, they are orders of magnitude better than regular encrypted wallets.
--When you do maintain encrypted wallets online, Armory uses a scrypt-like key-stretching function to make it difficult for someone to brute-force the password even with GPUs.
--If you make a paper/digital backup, all coins are always recoverable (after all, I think HDD failure is a bigger risk for most users than theft).
(2) The digital and paper backups are essentially the same. They are deterministic wallets and all keys ever produced by them are recoverable from the first address & chaincode in the wallet. The only caveat is imported keys, which will have to be backed up separately. However, you can "Backup Individual Keys" in order to create a unified backup of all imported addresses. You can even use it to get the private keys of all your addresses (used so far) in case you want to import them into another program/servicce.
Thanks for your interest! I'm always happy to answer more questions about Armory
