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I shredded the original die rolls. Thanks again, that's what I thought but am just being bitcoin cautious. To do things the bitcoin way, you need bitcoin store a lot reddit data for emails wallet many computers, and a centralized model is simpler and more efficient. With bitcoin, there is a public record reddit every account. Later when you want paper claim bitcoin of the coins paper this address and send them elsewhere, you broadcast a digital paper signed with your secret private key since reddit people can't calculate ECDSA signatures with pen and paper, you will likely import the key to a computer, even if it is disconnected from the internet. You import a paper wallet into a wallet software and spend part of wallet, and then wallet that the change is in the paper wallet.
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This one is nice too. This would be for the purpose of sending my coins to an offline wallet where I don't have to worry about them being hacked. If you want, split it up using samir's secret and put fragments in separate locations. What is the difference? You should roll a 6 sided die at least 62 times.
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Addresses are recorded in the blockchain, when someone spends coins. If you have bitcoin fairly powerful computer bitcoin is almost paper online, you can help the network by wallet Bitcoin Core. It can only store it. Paper first way is to "import" wallet private key into the reddit wallet. Can you reddit through a solid wall?
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Explain Offline Paper wallets like I'm five. : Bitcoin
So your passphrase would be something like " Is there a reason you choose dice specifically? It's probably about 5 years old. It's been used online in the past but if I wipe it and do a clean install and never use it online again, would that be safe? Or is there a chance it could be compromised when I bring the bitaddress. That's right, you just end up using numbers for your passphrase. I chose dice because they are "fair" meaning that the probability is the same to roll each of the six numbers.
I chose rolls because that exceeds bits of entropy, which is the maximum that a private key can actually contain. Although it would be possible to come up with a passphrase with more entropy than this, a bit private key could not make use of it. Also, you are very likely to fail to achieve such a high degree of randomness by typing random characters on the keyboard.
Rolling dice gives measurable assurance that you have achieved the maximum usable quantity of unpredictability. If you zero out an old computer and install a clean OS, then that is even safer than booting from CD.
Which is already pretty safe!! I would leave it offline permanently, or wipe it out again before connecting it to the internet. There is the theoretical chance of bringing over bugs on your USB stick -- just ask the Iranians. However, the probability is so miniscule that you can ignore it. More to the point, I don't know of any other options! As someone that doesn't have any experience with algorithms or digital security, it seems slightly crazy to me that 1 bitaddress.
It seems like someday, someone will come up with a way to reverse engineer the formula so that they can crack all the private keys they want just by having the public addresses. I've seen that info graphic that shows how unlikely this would be but surely some day it would happen, no? The numbers are so big that they are screwing with your intuition. Suppose that the private keys were represented by hydrogen atoms in the sun.
Sure, two people could select the exact same hydrogen atom, but the odds are so low that you don't need to worry about it happening. To give you an even better idea of how hard it would be to accidentally collide keys, see this blurb: When quantum computers really get going, they will be able to calculate a private key, given a public key, however the address is a hash of the public key, so they will have to execute the brute force attack inbetween the time that you transmit your signed transaction and the time it is included in a block.
The quantum computer threat will have to be dealt with eventually, but we have a lot of time to figure it out, and eventually, quantum technology should give us cryptography that is actually impossible to break, given that our understanding of physics is correct. It all atoms in a human body and a wall were lined up in a very specific way, it would be possible to walk through that wall. Possible, but it ain't gonna happen.
Oh, I have one more question. Or do you destroy it? I used die rolls to generate a private key, which I use as my "high entropy seed" to create all of the other paper wallets. I shredded the original die rolls. I kept the high entropy seed. If all of my paper wallets were lost in a fire, I could re-create them from the high entropy seed.
Okay, I think I got it. And you simply just version up the first private key by increasing the last number one digit at a time each time you want to make a new wallet? I assume you keep the high entropy seed somewhere separate of the printed wallets, correct?
And you lost me at "high entropy seed" I am struggling to get started and I keep finding new stuff that I have to learn about. The "high entropy seed" thing is not essential. You could simply input your die rolls as the brainwallet passphrase. I was just offering a way to avoid rolling dice again and again. You roll them a single time, and write down the sequence of rolls on a piece of paper. Then, you make a passphrase by starting with the seed, and adding "1" to the end.
That's your first passphrase. This technique is purely for convenience. It just means that you roll your dice a single time, rather than again for each address you make.
It also means that you can rebuild all of your addresses, so long as you hang on to the seed. If this doesn't clear it up, just ask a specific question and I'll try to clarify further. Because you run a few samples on it, and you compare the output with other address generators. As is described in the tutorial.
Also, because you follow reddit closely to see if the alarm goes off that bitaddress is hacked. Pretty sure I didn't say it, but my memory is not perfect. I throw down the gauntlet sir and challenge you to find it. Yeah, I was probably wrong to say that. Actually I don't know much about what happens at boot-time. I guess that booting is handled by the BIOS, so that even if you have all kinds of malware on your hard drive they cannot escape and touch your boot-from-CD experience.
It is imaginable however that wiping your hard drive is safer than not wiping your hard drive. I think that this was the motivation behind my comment. Yes - although pennies may be more likely to come up on one side If you are trying to roll a private key directly I suggest using a 16 sided die or use a six sided to do binary. Can you give me a little more background? I don't think I understand the question. This is instructions for how to create a paper wallet, not a wallet that would be stored on a USB stick.
I was under the assumption that a Armory wallet could be physically stored in a usb drive. In other words I boot up the pc with the usb drive and would be able to access the armory via that usb drive. I am hoping to be succesful at finding an easy secure alternative for BC wallets. Where the hell are the innovators when it comes to BC, it seems as if it is stagnating a bit.
I am just curious why we're taking the sha of the 50? Previously, I used rolls of the die, since it gives bits of entropy. I now believe that 50 rolls bits entropy is sufficient, based on the fact that Electrum and Armory use bit seeds.
Furthermore, since more than one private key will yield the same address, the maximum usable entropy is not the size of the private key bit but the size of the address bit.
So you actually max out the entropy capacity of the address at 62 rolls. The reason for using the private key yielded by the first roll of was just for compactness. The private key had fewer characters than Now that I have changed my recommendation to 50 this is no longer a valid reason, and I will update the tutorial. You've done a wonderful service here! Let's see if I can summon the tipbot.. Thanks for the tip, and I'm glad there are other hyper paranoid folks out there.
No need to use your savings to discover a new security vulnerability! Can you explain how the private key gets linked with the address in the bitcoin network? When you redeem your BTC from a paper wallet on an exchange or someplace, how does the bitcoin network know what the correct private key is?? It can't be reversed because of more fancy math -- although quantum computers could theoretically reverse it someday. Coinbase paper wallet is probably safe.
It requires you to trust more parties though, like coinbase and your browser etc etc. I would not use it to store more than a few hundred bucks personally. I'm currently in the process of auditing all my transactions for tax purposes. My current transaction history is so small it's negligible, but I'm setting a precedent for myself so it'll be easier when I make my first purchase.
I don't understand public private key cryptography, but somehow you can verify that the spender must know the right private key. Thanks for putting in the time!
After step 4, ensure you 'generate new address' while offline. Otherwise, the public and private keys will still be the same as when you first accessed the bitaddress. I don't think that it is necessary, as we're switching to the brainwallet tab and inputting a dice-generated passphrase.
I think your calculation with the different-sided dice should feature a divide operation, and not multiplication. I type one of the public addresses into blockchain. It shows up saying that there is no transaction history for that address. Does the fact that the blockchain found my address the first time I searched mean that my offline generated address is somehow known by blockchain??? Or is it just that the offline generated address conforms to some specification that blockchain recognizes and the one where I changed the last digit didn't Then I read on other forums that a lot of people have done throws.
Is 62 really as good as or should I make new private keys with throws? A private key is a number from 0 to 2 That means that there are 2 possible private keys. However, when calculating the public address, at some point the RIPEMD hash function is applied, which maps all of the private keys to a smaller list of public addresses.
If you roll a die 99 times, there are approximately 2 possible outcomes you could roll. However, since all of those private keys get shoehorned into 2 public addresses, that means that more than one private key leads to the same public address.
You may want to roll a couple extra times if you have dice that are not perfectly fair. I roll 64 times because it formats more nicely on paper. It is just as safe, so long as you roll it enough times.
You should roll a 6 sided die at least 62 times. I use the sha of dice because I know that it will give me bits of entropy. I don't know how much entropy is in a keypass random number. Earlier this year people got coins stolen because they used the Android random number generator, and it did not generate sufficiently random numbers. It is not possible for a normal person to memorize a bit key. Write down the seed. In more than one location. I bet you are times more likely to forget the seed than have burglars find it.
If you want, split it up using samir's secret and put fragments in separate locations. I am a bot. Send them to my inbox! Glad to hear that you were able to do it using an old android smart phone, so hopefully it'll work for me with the tablet. Obviously I can't return it if it has been used. There are several websites that do the same thing. I read on some other forum that this doesn't work so I am glad that did for you.
The only other thing that worries me is I could transfer a virus to the new computer from the USB drive used to download bitaddress on the old computer. At some point you are going to have to live with a little bit of risk, unfortunately, and transferring your file via USB is part of that risk. You can limit the risk by booting your internet-connected computer using an Ubuntu DVD.
This reduces the risk of infection. Even if you transfer a virus very unlikely via the USB, what can the virus do? Your tablet is not going to talk to the internet, so the virus can't send the private key to anyone.
You are going to run comparison checks to ensure that bitaddress is converting your dice-generated seed to a private key and address properly, so the virus cannot deterministically generate keys that are known to your attacker. Thanks again, that's what I thought but am just being over cautious.
Do I need to do the dice-generate seed, why can't i just put etc? If this sounds like a totally stupid thing to say, excuse me because I know absolutely nothing about the workings of a computer: If you are going to use that method there is no point in restricting yourself to the number Just bang away all over the keyboard. There is nothing definitely wrong with that method, but I prefer dice. I know that if I roll a die 62 times, I am getting the maximum amount of unpredictability. I cannot measure the unpredictability of my fingers hitting keys.
How many keys do I need to hit before I have hit enough keys to be unpredictable enough? Am I subconsciously doing some kind of pattern that people tend to do? I see what you mean. A lot of people have been burned by using what they thought was an "unguessable" brain wallet pass-phrase. If you can remember it, it can probably be guessed eventually. I hand copy from my phone. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy.
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New merchants are welcome to announce their services for Bitcoin, but after those have been announced they are no longer news and should not be re-posted. Anyone can see the balance of any Bitcoin address. You can add you address to a Blockchain. It's even possible to send to addresses that could never be accessed by anyone, ever because they could not be formed in a way such that they would have a corresponding private key.
When I generate one of these offline how do I know somebody else didn't make the same one? What if it makes a private key for an already existing account? The probability of that happening are astronomically tiny, because the number of possible addresses are absolutely massive.
Similarly, you could try to guess the private key of someone else's address by generating addresses over and over until you got the same address as them.
It would take you on the order of millions of years to guess the password to that address, if you had a modern supercomputer. Well, I was suggesting that you pick an address, and try to find the key to that one specific address.
But yes, if you try to find the key to any of the current addresses, you have a higher chance of success, but you may get an address with 1 satoshi in it, and you'll take a little bit longer to search, per address. We'll never fill more than a tiny fraction of that space. The longer version of that answer involves talking about spending all of the energy in the sun on computing power at some theoretical max non-quantum computation efficiency, and things of that nature.
This is something that always makes me nervous about Bitcoin. Someone can always stumble upon your address randomly. Sure, it's unlikely, but there is no reason why it can't happen. That's why I'll never put a significant portion of my net worth in Bitcoin or maybe more specifically, a single Bitcoin address. Yeah, you can either have a smaller risk of losing everything or a larger risk of losing a smaller amount.
I know the risk is SUPER small in both cases, but it bugs me nonetheless, especially given there is no mechanism for determining "illegitimate" access, much less a way to have stolen coins returned. Fortunately, this possibility is so remote that the word "can" simply stops meaning what you think it means. Can you walk through a solid wall? We normally say "no", but it isn't impossible it is merely astronomically improbable.
Anyone else ever generating the same bit private key as you is on the same order of improbability as waltzing right through the solid matter of the walls of your house and just taking your stuff.
Compare this to the quite probable, and common occurrence of someone professionally breaking into your home to steal you valuables. Encrypt your wallet with a password and keep it backed up, and such a break in cannot touch your bitcoins but can deprive you of mayonnaise jars full of dollar bills or precious metals. Granted I am not saying that Bitcoin is risk-proof. It has it's own risks, among them keylogging malware.
Information security is quite similar to physical security, it simply has different strengths and weaknesses and requires a different background to practice it responsibly. At least if someone breaks into your home, the police can potentially find your property and return it to you.
There is no way to do that with Bitcoin. And when I say that someone could come upon your private key, that doesn't mean they have to be targeting you. As more and more addresses become used, the chance of stumbling upon one already in use increases. Again, I think the chance is extremely low.
That's why I have and use Bitcoins. I just think it's not a good idea to put a lot of your wealth into them, because once they're gone, they're gone. That chance increases in much the same way as the chance a blade of grass could touch the moon increases every micrometer it grows. If somebody steals your bitcoin, by breaching your security or scamming you, then our current legal framework and forensic science has no credible way of recovering it for you.
FDIC cannot steal bitcoin from other people via inflation to recoup your loss. Police cannot outside the separate concern of "will not" invade other people's private holdings or transactions in order to trace where they went in order to re-unite you to them. So in short, Bitcoin is a poor choice for people who are not confident in their own information security skills. It is "real money" much like Gold, which is a bad choice for those who are not confident in their physical security skills.
Physical vaults and offline wallets alike are expensive, require discipline, and can be inconvenient! In comparison, fiat money can always be recovered via chargeback after fraudulent credit card transactions, or recouped via FDIC after a bank robbery, because that asset never actually belonged to you in the first place and thus you never had the power to irretrievably lose it.
It's similar to toys fought over by children which can always be re-allocated by the parents who actually run the place in order to settle disputes. Not everyone is responsible enough to "own" an asset so powerfully that even the government cannot claw it back from you, but on the other side of that coin, no force can claw it back from the thieves who trick you out of it either.
But I tip my hat to you for at least giving it a go, and may a multitude of new applications and demonstrations of the versatility of this kind of money unfold before us as time marches on. The public address become part of the blockchain when it receives funds.
The corresponding private key is never connected to the Internet. It's a permissions thing. When you spend money to another address, you're effectively specifying what private key has the right to spend that money. That is, only that public key's private key can write the next transfer. The blockchain doesn't need to know anything about that private key. Only a signature from the private key, that corresponds to the public key that has authority over that input is allowed to spend it next.
I can't speak to the implementations out there like Armory and Brainwallet, as I haven't directly used those. But I do understand the protocol and the math well enough to ELI5 this. In order to receive Bitcoin money, you first have to create a private key which you keep private , and from that a matching address. You can create these offline, even by doing the math on paper if you wish it's pretty hard math but not impossible for the very patient ;3.
The blockchain doesn't know you've done this. But you can't get any money if you never share that public address with people asking for dough. So you emerge from your no electricity concrete bunker with only the public address, and you post that online asking for moneys.
The blockchain still doesn't know yet, all you've done is informally told people about your address. But now they can pay you and that's how the blockchain gets wind of your address. Now the blockchain records that all kind of people are raining BTC down on your address.
Nobody really knows you have the matching private key, or anything. They just assume that you do. Their financial obligation to you is resolved when they send money per your instructions, it's your problem if you never had a matching private key behind it. Now you "have" all this BTC. You have it because it's kept safe for you on the impossible to forge or change public blockchain ledger and you own the key to it.
This is just like people dumping goods into a storage locker that you have a hidden key to. What your private key can do and virtually all it can do is "sign messages". You can sign any message you want. That means, if you want to prove to someone you have the key without moving any bitcoin at all, you could have them send you a random bit of text and you could do the math in your bunker to sign that text, and spit out just the signature.
Anyone who sees your public address can confirm only the owner of the matching private key could have made that signature, but you don't have to bring your private key out of the bunker to do it. That's the mechanism you use to spend coins, too. You either use some software like Armory in your bunker, or do it all on paper while checking the protocol reference books often, and create a simple message which orders that some Bitcoins that you own should get spent to some new address out in the world.
Maybe your VPN provider. By itself the message is meaningless, anyone can easily construct it. But then you sign that message using your private key, also in the bunker. Only someone with access to your private key can do that, and that's the magic that allows only you to spend your bitcoins.
So you create the message, sign it, and then bring just the message out of your bunker. You broadcast this out on the network normally through some more software, like the public-facing component of Armory and Miners can tell this is a legitimate request to spend bitcoins, signed by the owner of the private key that matches the public key they've all been sent to.
So that's the basic magic! But there is one more important piece to most offline and brain wallets:. Usually people don't want to go to all this trouble just to have a single address they control.
They want unlimited addresses. They want to set up cold storage, so that the website they sell Widgets off of can make up a new address for each new customer, but the matching private keys only exist in a bunker that slatternly webserver never had and never will have access to.
So now, in your bunker, instead of just making one private key, you use a mathemagical formula that transforms one "seed" — usually a passphrase or random string — into an endless parade of private keys. In an offline wallet, the seed could be random and really long and full of entropy should you choose. In a brainwallet, the seed is normally a long string of meaningless-sounding words, carrying about bits of entropy. Since you can memorize the long phrase, you can recreate this "offline wallet" in any sufficiently secure location in order to wield control over all of your stored coin at a moment's notice.
You also get a "public seed" out of all this math, and the public seed is safe to bring out of the bunker. Nobody can get your private seed from the public seed, nor your private keys from it.
All they can get is the matching public addresses. You put this public seed in the public-facing bitcoin software on your webserver, and it can generate public addresses on the fly from the seed.