Bitcoin Forum

Hey everyone, I've been lurkin' for a few weeks, my first poast. Another newb here, getting into BTC/LTC.

I thought it'd be fun to create an official-looking certificate for people who, like my mom, don't quite understand cryptocurrencies yet; holding a physical paper with official-looking Guilloché patterns helped!
So I spent the weekend having some fun with patterns and colours with the intent of creating something in the spirit of Bitcoin's gold and Litecoin's silver essences.
These certificates may even be useful for the uninitiated creating new wallets. You can give them a blank sheet with instructions to fill out the blank spaces (5 rows, 10 columns) and to "never show it to anyone and never lose it!" I also included a blank space on the left for a title or other info.
I recommend using a permanent marker or any kind of marker that bleeds through the paper to ensure a good chemical bond with the ink (inkjets are usually rated for 100+ years) and paper.

Using a password of 50 characters (maximum on these sheets) yields an average of ~200 entropy bits, an "overkill" level of security. You can find out your password's entropy bit measurement here: http://rumkin.com/tools/password/passchk.php (http://rumkin.com/tools/password/passchk.php)

I created PDF's in CMYK and sRGB gamuts.
I also created hi-res TIFF's for those of you out there who don't trust PDF's (you can change a TIFF's gamut in most photo editors).
I enabled Photoshop editing permissions when I created the PDF's so feel free to modify them as needed.
They're all 2550x3300 pixels @ 300 PPI, 8x11 (letter) sheet.

 ;D :D ;) ;D I'm releasing them with no copyright but if you find them useful or just pretty to look at, send a new guy some coin, my addresses are in my signature.  8) :P ::) ;D :D

Let me know if there's anything I can do to improve them or if anyone wants a certificate like this for another cryptocurrency.

I've uploaded everything to Mega.co.nz.
If my Mega account bandwidth runs out (free users get 1Tb monthly I believe), let me know as I have other file hosts but am too lazy to upload to others at the moment.

Nice work, that really looks good (Adobe Illustrator?).

But... For what exactly do you want to use it? A paper wallet (=private key on paper)? Why should it make any sense if a private key on paper looks official?

Pretty cool. I second the above... how does it work?

Illustrator+Photoshop.

I'm going to use them to give some buddies a few Litecoin in a wallet.dat burned on a CD with one of these certificates. They can always print a new certificate and set a new encryption password.

They could also be useful if you want to pay someone offline. You can burn a wallet.dat onto a CD and give them the encryption password on one of these, kind of like a deed. Of course that requires them to trust you since you could have made an extra copy and you already have their password.

To me, they'll be useful to quickly identify which password to use for extra wallets I have. That may be how they're most useful -- for organization -- or at least that's what I had in mind when I made them.
And some people (my mom) just need things that look official. I wouldn't have been able to convince her to create a wallet and buy a few bitcoins without an official-looking paper.  8)

I'll eventually print out a few of these and put at least one (wrapped in foil so bled-through permanent marker can't be read) in a fire safe deposit box.

an example..






and here's a screencap of analysis for that 50-character password (http://rumkin.com/tools/password/passchk.php (http://rumkin.com/tools/password/passchk.php))

just remembering a long (50char) sentence is the most effective kind of password.