Let's celebrate milestones like $50.000/$100.000 processed with articles on crypto news sites or introduce some big players to show the world the power of this pyramid in realtime!
Armory allows you to create a deterministic wallet. This is a wallet where all the other addresses that will ever exist are based on an initial secret seed, so it is sufficient to create a backup of only this seed.
+1 Thanks for explaining. Seems like I need to convert and start depending on one of the deterministic types but doesn't this always require some additional software or supplier when thinking about long-term storage? For example if Armory doesn't exist anymore in 2023 who is going to recover/recreate my wallet?
This would leave the option to use single "receiving one transaction only" paper wallets? My only concern is staying future-proof and independent as possible. Not disregarding the various tools but there are no guarantees to stay around for years to come.
backing up your wallet: The balance of your bitcoins may not be in the address you see, and the entire contents of one address may be emptied by just one small transfer.
Most paper wallets if have seen only store both the public and private keys. How does Armory do this?
paper wallet: The whole point is to generate a can't-be-hacked wallet. You've made one on your computer in the way everyone expects you have, leaving data behind on that machine or a log of your activity if you've been hacked and have a key and screen recording trojan horse.
My bad, should be done using a live-cd and take it off-line just to be sure it's totally secure.
So this advice must be regarded with RED warning tape!
it's the noob section after all
Post
Topic
BoardBeginners & Help
Topic OP
Method of storing wallet on paper
by
Nightshader
on 23/11/2013, 20:13:24 UTC
In respect of opening up my account here I like to share some things learned over the last few days.
EDIT:
This advice must be regarded with RED warning tape!
Got some Bitcoins in my wallet, how to cold store them on paper?
I already made some backups of the wallet.dat the bitcoin-qt (original) client uses to store my wallet. But that didn't feel good knowing that this one file could be brute-forced to open the pass-phrase. So after some research the conclusion was: Just knowing the uncompressed private key of the wallet is the only thing needed to store securely on paper ( given the private key only, one can calculate the public Bitcoin address and the blockchain knows the number of btc on this address and stores it forever ).
What I practically did:
Extracted the real uncompressed private key so I'am independent of the clients backup format
Using Bitcoin-qt go the Help menu and Enable the Debug window
Use the command: walletpassphrase "yourpassword" 600
Now your locked/encrypted wallet has been opened for private commands
Use the command:dumpprivkey yourbitcoinaddress
Now you see something like 91b24bf9f5288532960ac687abb035127b1d28a5
Generated new Bitcoin address and stored this cold like above.
Send some of the bitcoins to this "active use" wallet
Waited for many confirmations and closed the client, deleted the wallet from Bitcoin-qt since this is long term cold storage
Added the "active use" wallet by using the command: importprivkey ActiveUse rescan=true
Now the switch is complete and the risk has been reduced to just the "active use" coins on my computer
So without installing another client, wallet manager or giving my details to some online website the wallet has been stored on paper and switched. Your coins are always recoverable without knowing any password when you have the private key available in plaintext - after many years this is easily accessible and independence is good - specifically when it's our private wallet you should not depend on 3th-party tools,websites or some kind of vendor lock.
BTC tips are welcome: 1JqZaexSV45MFDYzKbV4sak3QevkJdMJsj