Quote from: justusranvier on November 03, 2013, 02:41:38 PM

Quote from: Kouye on November 03, 2013, 01:23:40 PM

After the last seizures of "wallets" from authorities, I have been wondering about how to prevent them from extracting the passphrase through chemicals and/or torture.

Keep the bulk of your savings in multisig outputs, where the other private key holders are friends you can trust who live on other continents.

I understood those were the best options now, this (which requires trust - how tempting would it be for a "friend" to blackmail you once you need his signature?) and keeping hidden cold wallets (which implies bitcoins being frozen) - already listed, btw Wink

I'm focusing more on the seizure of a "hot_wallet.dat", now.

Facts:
- They can list all the unspent outputs from such a wallet, with the associated public key.
- The wallet.dat file also hosts all the private keys for those, and they are only protected by a passphrase buried in your brain.

Given those circumstances, I currently see no way how torture could fail, apart maybe from hosting the hot wallet on a specific, non-replicable device such as discussed with Joel, accepting a self-destruct key in addition to the real passphrase.