Re: Andreas Antonopoulos says to stop using paper wallets, do you agree?
⭐ Merited by pooya87 (1)
Please fasten your flame retardant suit, because I'm going to have to nitpick your statements here:
If someone wanted a single key Electrum would probably be the easiest tool to use, there's no reason not to. The Ian Coleman tool can be used as well, and allows you to enter your own entropy. There's no reason not to use an HD wallet to extract a single key.
Again, I beg to differ. When properly stored paper can survive for thousands of years, and there's plenty of proof of that. The archival resilience of CDs, on the other hand is only theoretical, and CDs require equipment that is slowly going obsolete. Even if they don't go away all together, their use will diminish to the point that the equipment to read them will become somewhat expensive.
As for destroying the unneeded used keys, once it's served it's usefulness paper is easily destroyed with nothing more expensive than a match. I could probably snap a CD into a few pieces with my bare hands, but I don't think my mother could. She would certainly need a $5 wrench.
It would be better if there was specialized software that you can download and install that is just for generating a paper wallet.
It is quite surprising that nobody has attempted to make such a program yet, forcing everyone to rely on these unsafe websites. For the record, even legit websites like bitaddress.org are not safe to generate private keys on, because the HTML can be manipulated by an Inspect Element or something like that.
Electrum and Core are too complicated for just generating a paper wallet, for newbies.
It is quite surprising that nobody has attempted to make such a program yet, forcing everyone to rely on these unsafe websites. For the record, even legit websites like bitaddress.org are not safe to generate private keys on, because the HTML can be manipulated by an Inspect Element or something like that.
Electrum and Core are too complicated for just generating a paper wallet, for newbies.
If someone wanted a single key Electrum would probably be the easiest tool to use, there's no reason not to. The Ian Coleman tool can be used as well, and allows you to enter your own entropy. There's no reason not to use an HD wallet to extract a single key.
Paper is easily destroyed by the likes of water and rats though. Better would be inside a text file on a CD-R in a storage sleeve - already rat-proof, not really waterproof but that can be solved by putting the sleeve in a safe or something like that - and, unlike paper wallets, are easily destroyed when they are no longer needed. Now there isn't really a use case for destroying paper wallets besides protecting your privacy by hiding the addresses you used, but you'd need to buy an expensive paper shredder to do the equivalent for paper wallets. A CD can be destroyed cheaply.
Again, I beg to differ. When properly stored paper can survive for thousands of years, and there's plenty of proof of that. The archival resilience of CDs, on the other hand is only theoretical, and CDs require equipment that is slowly going obsolete. Even if they don't go away all together, their use will diminish to the point that the equipment to read them will become somewhat expensive.
As for destroying the unneeded used keys, once it's served it's usefulness paper is easily destroyed with nothing more expensive than a match. I could probably snap a CD into a few pieces with my bare hands, but I don't think my mother could. She would certainly need a $5 wrench.