Bitcoin Forum

We took the Raspberry Pi and made it into an offline Bitcoin wallet.

It's powered by Raspbian and has Bitcoin Armory pre-installed which allows you to manage your offline wallet, receive coins, print paper wallets and more..

Using the Cold Pi is easy, just plug it in to an HDMI source, wait for it to boot and you're good to go.

We've started taking orders today via BitPay.

For more info please visit the Cold Pi website: http://coldpi.com (Still missing some manuals and FAQs, for any questions please ask here or email info@coldpi.com)

If you have any suggestions or ideas on how to improve Cold Pi we will be more than happy to hear.

Thanks.

Obvious suggestion is to just sell a suitably configured SD card on its own.  

You've also got a typo, you've accidentally put a 1 in front of $65 ;)

Yes, we're planning on selling the SDHC card alone. Regarding the price, we're selling the Model B Raspberry Pi which is $50 alone. Add the Case, power cable, sdhc card, shipping and installation time and you'll find that we're actually selling it for quite cheap.

Looks great!

Nice job!

$165? this is a joke right?

Greedy much?

Im guessing they will adjust prices depending on demand.

xabbix, If I could make a suggestion, can you pre-load with a little btc in there?

If somebody is paying $165, how about giving $5-$20 worth of btc as a little promotional give away.

Where are the other manual on your site? There's only one available.

No I'm actually not greedy, if you take all costs into account you will see so yourself.

We're currently working on more manuals, we will release a few today and some more tomorrow.

You can buy the complete kit on amazon for $65
http://www.amazon.com/CanaKit-Raspberry-Complete-Original-Preloaded/dp/B008XVAVAW

Charging $100 to image an SD card is not quite cheap IMO. THough the idea is cool.

Wow that's pretty cool, I have to say I can't buy these where I live for that price. It's kind of weird since the Raspberry Pi B model price is fixed pretty much worldwide on $50, so he has to fit in an SD card, HDMI, power cable and case for 15 which is impossible, so maybe it's refurbished or something?

One more thing about the SDHC card, the one you're seeing on the picture is a Class 4 SDHC card, I'm providing a class 10 card which read/writes much faster.

Just how much do you think those plastic cases or cables cost in volume? Its not impossible, nor used. Its from quite a reputable seller.
RS/allied also sells Model B's for $35
http://www.alliedelec.com/lp/120626rasomodelb/

$37 with 8GB card
http://www.alliedelec.com/Search/ProductDetail.aspx?SKU=70313519

OK, note taken. I will do some more research and see if I can purchase it cheaper and will definitely alter the price accordingly.

Thanks for your help!

I have added the option to buy the SDHC card alone without the Pi.

I'm still looking into getting Raspberry Pis for a better price so the price for the whole kit has not changed drastically yet.

Please let me know of any issues.

This smells like a GPL violation. You need to post the binary and all the build scripts to create the binary distribution in order to comply with the GPLv3.

I was under the impression that if I do not modify the source code and keep the open sourced copy on the device I'm selling that I am not violating GPLv3, am I wrong to think that?

What is Coldpi recommended back up procedure for the SD card?

I'm writing this exact tutorial at the moment, you could use Win32 Disk Imager (also available for linux).

Since you are selling a binary, you also need to make the source required (and build scripts) to recreate the binary available.  You can also sell this, but only at the same price you are selling your binary. Anyone that buys your overpriced shit is also free to distribute both the binary and source for free (so don't expect to sell more than a half dozen copies before it gets posted publicly).

The source code is included within the SDHC card. If you feel this is overpriced shit you don't have to buy it.. People are free to compile it on their own as I did.

And that other device also has to be offline to have true cold storage?

Yes, since you're cloning your SDHC card you would like to do that on another offline machine since you don't want to risk exposing the data on your SDHC card.

Thanks. I've had some SD card issues in the past with Pi. Although I'm sure it was (partially) user error.

Good luck on your project. I see the turn-key natural being appealing.

IM sure its not. I have two pi's, my brother has a pi, my neighbor has a pi. All 4 have problems with corrupting SD cards, regardless of brand or type of SD card,  and two of the PIs have loose contacts in the sd card connector (well maybe all 4, but only two you have to wiggle/twist/bend/use tape to make it work at all).  I really wish the Pi could boot from USB.

Very cool idea, although rather expensive. The Piper wallet does the same thing (off line bitcoin wallet) and it includes a built in printer, nice decked out software, for about the same price.

https://piperwallet.com

Love the project. THX. Would prefer just an SD card image as I already have the hardware. Armory is the best wallet for my purposes. I hoped for a long time that someone would provide a ready made image. I there a downlad link somewhere? ;-) Which one is the best dumb dedicated printer for the Armory paper backups?

I love piper but it costs more than Cold Pi and also provides less features. Cold Pi has Armory that allows you to manage multiple wallets/addresses, print paper wallets and many more features.

Decided to close shop and release the code so everyone can download freely, see this:

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1typhl/cold_pi_offline_raspberry_pi_based_wallet/cectur2

This is pretty cool. Now I'll have something to do with my raspberry pi I got for Christmas.

Glad you liked it, if anyone has any suggestions on other relevant software that I can add to the Cold Pi please let me know.

As previously mentioned, all compiled code is available freely for download. You can also choose to pay for the kit or the SD card alone if you don't have the knowledge or time to deal with it.

Could you also fit a browser and the offline version of https://bitcoinpaperwallet.com/ (https://bitcoinpaperwallet.com/) in? That would be awesome. I could replace a whole PC with this setup.

Browser is already there, ships with the Raspbian OS. I didn't mention it but I'm also adding an offline version of the bitaddress.org code. I'll add the bitcoinpaperwallet.com one as well.

Thanks!

Actually, all you need to do is add Armory to the Piper and you have that too. Remember Piper is also a Raspberry PI but with an included printer. So technically it's Cold Pi plus printer. In reality though with both projects you're just paying for the box. The software is all open source. :-)

Yes you're right, problem is that compiling the Armory for the RPi is a nightmare..

I think the key point being made is: You have no recourse if a user of your coldpi creates an image of the sd card posts a link to the image as the software is open-source and you don't "own" the software. I like the idea about pre-loading it with BTC but then you may need a register as a MSB with MT license to sell within the USA.

There's no reason for anyone to create an image since I'm sharing compiled Armory source available for free download. The Cold PI kit will be sold to people that does not have the time/knowledge to deal with purchasing a new Raspberry Pi and installing everything on it.

Regarding preloading it with Bitcoin. It's a cool idea but not practical. I do not want to launch the Armory client after I install it on a client's Cold Pi since they cannot tell if I also took their private key and saved it somewhere.

Hi!

Great initiative, I tried to follow the instructions, I fail on one python message:

coldstore@pi:~/BitcoinArmory-0.88-beta$ python ArmoryQt.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "ArmoryQt.py", line 33, in <module>
    from PyQt4.QtCore import *
ImportError: No module named PyQt4.QtCore

any ideas?

I wouldn't mind at all to pay for a ready-made image to download, but I am to impatient to wait for a piece of plastic in the snail-mail. Think people with serious bitcoin assets would be quite weary of using warez copied to an obscure site btw :-)

Checking out this error now, will update

My installation manual was not complete, I've updated now to include all necessary packages required to install Armory. Please try now http://coldpi.com/manuals/install.html

I know you are probably doing this with good intentions, but it seems a lot of people are putting a lot of trust in these kind of products without thinking about the security possibilities.

If I wanted to steal some bitcoin this would be a fantastic way to do it.  I could modify the armory source to stash any PKs loaded to an obscure location on the SD card.  I could then modify one of the standard linux daemons to wait for an internet connection and then send the contents of this obscure PK file to myself.  I know that this is theoretically an offline wallet but I can see many people in a moment of weakness establishing an internet connection  just long enough to download and install one of their favorite apps that doesn't come in your bundle.

Again, I doubt this is the case, but people really shouldn't be running software on anything that they haven't personally verified the source/binaries.  When setting up an environment verify the OS, the bitcoin client and any other tools that you will need.  There isn't any way to do that with this, a whole lot of blind faith in an anonymous entity is required.

Indeed it is possible for me to steal coins from users who choose to use my compiled Armory version, however it is extremely difficult for me to do that, and impossible if you actually follow my own instructions (which is to NEVER connect the Pi to the internet).

By the way, if anyone is interested in adding something to the bundle, he can do it via USB instead of connecting the device to the internet which is quite convenient even compared to directly plugging the Pi to the internet.

How about adding a script with coldpi that removes the ethernet interface and the temptation to easily connect the coldpi to the internet?

Well I don't want to cripple the device by removing the interface. I will however disable it by default, so even if you connect the cable by mistake nothing will happen until you start the networking service manually.

I'll be uploading the complete Raspberry Pi SD image soon (not just the Armory source as currently available).

IT would be cool to bundle this all together on a small mini-itx computer with hard drive that could both run as a full node (support Bitcoin!) and run armory for your cold storage needs. It could be set up to only have the port open to the outside world to connect to the bitcoin network, nothing else.

In my opinion, if the network cable is plugged to the board, it cannot be considered as 'cold' storage.

The Cold Pi image can now be downloaded freely, please have a look here:

http://coldpi.com/manuals/install-image.html

Regarding the security issues that were raised earlier in this thread, I've also included bitaddress.org's source code (that can be verified via md5 checksum against the current version on github) so you can now basically generate a new key via the bitaddress.org HTML file and import it into Armory.

By doing so you eliminate my ability to mess around with the Armory key generation function and my ability affect the randomness of the process.

Since the device is not intended and should never be connected to the internet, other than to mess around with the randomness of the genkey function I cannot do much more to gain profit.

Just to state the obvious, I have not infected the Raspberry Pi with any malicious software and have not made any code changes to either the Armory client, Raspbian OS or bitaddress.org HTML file.

ELI5 - How does this compare to something like the Trezor?

http://www.bitcointrezor.com

You, or someone else, could theoretically alter the code in such a way that every address the code generates is actually from the same master seed. So to a regular user it might look random and fair, but in reality you would have the master seed and thus access to everyone who ever generates addresses with it.

Not saying that you did, but it's possible.

Trezor can be used as either hot or cold storage. You can easily move coins to trezor's address and use it as cold storage but also allows you to plug the trezor to an internet machine and safely transfer coins as a hot wallet.

The cold pi is intended for cold storage only. Of course you can still spend coins on the Cold Pi address but the way to do it is a bit more complicated than trezor. You will need to export the watch only address from your cold pi to an internet machine, create a transaction using the watch only address, move the transaction data via USB, sign it on the cold pi and move it back to the internet machine.

Yes but if you use the bitaddress.org HTML file that I've included (and can be verified via md5 checksum) you can generate the private key there and import it into Armory. So I can't control the master seed or anything else..

yes i've had the same problems with the SD cards, the problem lies in the contacts not making good contact in de SD sleeve. If you open the case and put a small rubber pressing the sd card harder down and therefore making better contact, you should not having troubles anymore.

Correct me if i'm wrong but you CANT import a wallet created by other client to Amory. To do what you said above, you have to make a new wallet in Armory then import the privatekey/address to that wallet.

So what happens if that wallet was created not by random key generator? can you touch those imported addresses?

You can import a private key into your Armory wallet. Even if I had generated the wallet myself (which I don't, and if you install the image you can see that you'll get the 'create your new armory wallet' splash screen. Also you can check and see that there's no ~/.armory directory before you launch Armory for the first time).

If you choose to import a private key from bitaddress.org's html, as far as I know, there's nothing I could do beforehand to get your coins. However if you choose to 'sweep' the address, that will move the funds to the Armory generated address which is something you would like to avoid if you do not trust me.

Hi, I am tring to write my sdcard with the image provided here:

but I always get this error:


Can someone help me editing the iso to remove unecessary things to reduce its space?

I bought the NOOBS card with my pi but it seems that it only comes with 7.32GB and the image provided has 7.40GB...

 Thanks

I think you might just have found out what your problem is then. Try a bigger one. Are you properly writing it with an imager program?

I did it myself with this card following the other guide provided by coldpi:

I just thinked that if the other image doesn't fit on 8gb cards you should update this point on the other tutorial:

Thanks anyway

I'm sorry it didn't work out. You might have to wait for the owner of this thread to drop by. Maybe write hm a PM.