Post
Topic
Board Armory
Re: Moving ALL OFFLINE from bitcoin-qt wallet.dat to Armory Offline HD, w/ multi-sig
by
CircusPeanut
on 17/11/2015, 17:59:11 UTC
Paranoia is good, but it's important to focus that paranoia in the right direction.

First priority is to make a secure offline Armory wallet. You seem to have the right ideas for protecting yourself from an array of threats.

The next priority is to focus on protecting your new offline Armory wallet from yourself. You should think about how you want to fragment your paper backup. For my savings I use a 3-of-6 paper backup with a secure print code hand written on each page. If my printer has been hacked, the attackers will realize it's no use to them. I store the fragments in a combination of hiding places, and with family members. I protect my offline wallet with a long passphrase and the laptop is stored in a safe with a key. It's quite possible that I will forget the passphrase someday, or lose the key to my safe. However, that's OK, the chance that I will ever lose access to 4 out of 6 of my paper backup fragments has an engineering approximation of 0.

Focus on testing the new Armory wallet before you commit your bitcoin savings to it. Practice restoring the wallet from your backup fragments. Make sure that you can read your hand written secure print code. Practice receiving and sending small amounts of bitcoin with your offline wallet.

It's really important to make sure you can send transactions from your offline wallet. This requires a functional online Armory instance. This is the most common barrier between new users and their bitcoins. Many new users send bitcoins to their offline wallet before verifying that the entire blockchain has been loaded and scanned on their online Armory instance. Don't be that guy.

Remember that YOU are the biggest threat to your bitcoin savings.

Once you feel confident in your ability to secure and access your new Armory wallet, go ahead transfer your bitcoin savings to it. I recommend that you simply send a transaction for the entire balance from you bitcoin-qt wallet to your new Armory wallet. If you are in the process of emptying your bitcoin-qt wallet, there's no need to be so careful with it.

Do not over complicate sending bitcoins to your new wallet.

Import and Sweep have very specific use cases and yours is not it.  There are very few legitimate use cases for those two features. Unless you know for sure that you need to Import or Sweep an address, you don't. For example:

Use Import if you have a vanity address that you want to keep.

Use Sweep if you have bitcoins protected with a random private key on a piece of paper.

Good luck and enjoy sleeping at night.