Bitcoin Forum

Hi there

I like Armory in that I can back up the whole wallet with a root key - a password that can be written down to recover the whole wallet.
Unfortunately, Armory seems more buggy than a couple of years ago, and costs hours of wasted time.

Is there another wallet that uses bitcoinqt (for a full node) and has a single-master-password (root key) that isn't full of bugs?

I prefer the idea of not having to worry about digital-file backups.

I get the impression that to do this using bitcoinqt that I'd have to write down / print-out every private key of every receiving address ever used. Is that right?

Thanks

What you think about using hardware wallet like trezor where one recovery phrase can be used to recover whole wallet and unlike web wallets your wallet file will not be stored anywhere online.

Also electrum like light weight wallet can be considered safer than online wallet.

Are you referring to wanting to use a seed to recover your entire wallet? (eg a HD wallet?). If this is the case, I would note that this is not quite the same as using a "password" to recover your wallet.

I am not aware of any other HD wallets (other than core) that are an HD wallet, although you might have a couple of options if you have a little bit of technical expertise.

What I believe to be your best option would be to run an electrum server, then run electrum and have it only connect to your electrum server. This will probably also be your simplest solution.

I believe that both the blockchain.info and the blocktrail.com wallets are open source. You could potentially fork either of these wallets on github, and modify the code so that transaction information is retrieved from your own full node instead of the blockchain.info or blocktrail.com full node respectively. I know that blockchain.info's wallet uses a seed to derive the xprivkey, and I believe the same is true for blocktrail. If you go this route, the chances of you loosing your money are elevated as if you made a coding mistake then you might either tell someone to send BTC to an address whose private key you do not control or outright lose access to your private keys.

My gocoin software is a full node and its wallet works on single-master-password.
But it doesn't use bitcoin-qt - it implements the node by itself.

I think the recent versions create HD wallets so you only need one backup.
But first you need to create a new wallet, with a new version of bitcoin-qt.
And then you'd probably prefer to backup the file, instead of printing it.
Not quite sure - you may want to ask here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=4.0

Yes. You only need a single backup. However, the way it works is that everytime the password is changed, the seed will also be changed. Your previous addresses will be saved but not your future ones. You need to make another backup when you change a password.

To me the easiest by far is using SEED and Electrum.  Those 12-13 words can be kept anywhere, and when you use them on any machine you can rebuild your entire wallet.  ALL addresses ever used and their transactions will come back quickly.  No digital files to retain as you mentioned above.

A noteworthy point mentioned above is that ANY solution, where at any time, the private keys/SEED words are online is a risk.  You can help to mitigate that risk by encrypting your wallet, which will then encrypt the SEED.  The better solution, again my opinion, is to use a hardware wallet so NO keys ever see online.

You can use an electrum wallet offline for cold storage, and transfer a transaction to a different online wallet to send coins. The cold storage wallet never needs to go online.

http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/coldstorage.html

There is no SEED on a watching only wallet so you can't rebuild the wallet using SEED on that machine.  To rebuild the online wallet (watching only computer) and its transactions, you would need to save the MPK (master public keys) from the cold storage wallet.  Using the paradigm you describe you would never allow SEED on a watching only machine.  As long as you have saved the SEED on the other machine you could always create a new wallet on the cold machine, and then copy/paste the MPKs to the watching only machine and rebuild that way.  Therefore the offline/cold machine wouldn't contain any transactions or history since its never online.  The watching only wallet contains all the history, and remember the same BTC addresses are created by bringing the MPKs over from the cold machine.  Electrum makes this so easy!

The whole point of this is by saving ONE SEED LIST, it allows for complete recovery of both cold and hot machines.  Its just for the hot you grab the MPKs from the cold to make it happen.