Bitcoin Forum

Dumb Question,  we store all the bitcoins sent to cold storage in a vault that is a faraday cage shielded to protect against something like this.

My question is due to us getting bombarded every 2 days now with CME's coming from the sun,  the next one scheduled to hit earth tomorrow is that something I could be using for promotional stuff?   

In case you don't know what I am talking about,  as you're reading this planes are being diverted due to the electromagnetic storm.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2012/01/23/planes-rerouted-fearing-strongest-radiation-storm-in-7-years/


Like your bitcoins would be safe even in the event of a larger one such as a Carrington Event if they are sent to flexcoin's cold storage option.

It's probably a really good idea to get the word out!
+1

lol fox news

Why not print a private key with QR code on paper.  That should be safe from solar flares if you put it in a fireproof box.  Don't forget, the wiring in your house isn't too different from the telegraph lines that burst into flames in 1859.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

hehe we already have private cold storage EMP proof... CD discs and paper wallets or even stone  :D

private keys punched or engraved into steel plates in a good sized safe would be pretty safe.  Fireproof to 1500+ degrees. 

Wrap your media and your paper backups in copper mesh, place in a waterproof enclosure and keep in your freezer- the poor man's fireproof Faraday cold storage.

I think a bigger problem is the possible "I lost everyone's bitcoins due to the solar flare, sorry, so long and thanks for all the fish" scams.

But we can see if they move.

A paper wallet is a million times easier.  They work really well.

but so fragile at the same time  :-\

Make a photocopy and keep it in two places.

Create it from passphrase and then it's also in your head.

or maybe laminate some sheets too. Talking about deterministic wallets, where i can find a tool for that ?

Look for Casascius Bitcoin Utility on github.

thanks

Well, it might not be that big of a deal, but if it's what you're doing, I wouldn't think it would *hurt* to advertise that fact. There would definitely be people who choose your service over others just for that.

Or you could put them in liquid nitrogen for even colder storage.  ;D

On a single piece of media that could spontaneously fail for any reason?

I would be more comfortable hearing that the private keys were kept in two places and were maintained in such a way that, for example, an unexpected death of the custodian of those coins wouldn't result in their loss, while meanwhile ensuring that they're adequately protected from theft.

I don't know that they don't have multiple copies, or what the data is stored on.

I'm just pointing out that there are people who will hear about the solar flares due this year, think, "Holy crap! My computers might not be safe!", and then sometime down the road see the "Solar-Flare Safe!" line on their webpage and jump right on it.

I have no comment as to the usefulness of it. Just that it shouldn't *hurt* sales to put it up on their website, and might actually gain a few.

My somewhat limited understanding is that present-day computer memory (RAM, ROM, but also flash) is susceptible to failures due to high-energy particles (aka cosmic rays), solar flares, and also background radioactive decay of the very materials electronic components are built from. Solar flares also disturb the magnetic field of the Earth, thereby occasionally weakening the shielding against cosmic rays. Whenever you fly on an airplane, the rate of failure of cells in your USB drive is significantly higher than on the ground. There are error-correcting mechanism in place that help to some extent.

Magnetic storage, as most of us know, is even less reliable (albeit with a different set of modes of failure) unless we keep redundant copies.

Having said all this, I conclude that most of responses in this thread so far are quite reasonable: one of the many beauties of Bitcoin is that private keys can be represented in a simple, physical form factor which is much more robust than present day electronics. Sheets of metal or even paper sound much more appropriate than having to worry about Faraday cages, radiation hardening, HDD failure, and such.

To answer your question,  we employ Multiple backups  -- storage in a bank safe,  storage in a faraday safe cage,  and storage on another "classified" method..  LOL!! classified meaning I really don't want to spell out all our backup solutions due to security. 

Cold storage has a more robust backup solution than normal banking,  but the reason for that is simple usefulness,  when a coin is sent to cold storage,  it's literally sent to a machine that is off,  hence it's unuseable until it's recalled back (which takes about 72 hours to manually go to the bank, pick up the drive,  download the blockchain,  then forward it to the proper user) ...  so it's not helpful for immediate usage, but WAY helpful as a secure savings account.

Laser engrave private keys on a tungsten bucking bar. The bank can burn down around it and it will still be readable.
http://we.lovebitco.in/img/tungsten.jpg

Are there any good tutorials for printing private keys importable to mtgox from a wallet.dat that anyone could recommend.  Preferably for linux?

-N

I think it would be a trivial utility to make...

I hear you.  What I mean is, do you know of a good step by step tutorial for generating public and priv addresses?  I took a look at your utility on github and didn't see much documentation.  It may be there and I may just have to spend some time figuring it out.  Casascius, you are very experienced with printing keys and I've seen your thread on generating keys from a passphrase.  I'm just looking for a little help in this area and maybe a good tutorial.  I've been meaning to generate and print some keys for a while so I can have my friend engrave them into steel plates.  I suppose I could just get some casascius coins and load them up and have my friend engrave the priv key.  Duh.

-N

vanitygen will do that, just give it a simple phrase and it will spit out several addresses and keys a second, and it has been used a lot without making a bad key.

At present, vanitygen can be built on Linux, and requires the openssl and pcre libraries.

This will print random addresses and keys faster than you can load paper:

./vanitygen -q -k 1 > /dev/lp0

Just get a computer from NASA, they can withstand going into orbit with no problems at all

I don't know dude, I can load paper pretty fast ;), jk thanks.

If you want to just generate some brand new keys, go to Bitaddress.org and hit "Generate"... simple.  A neato utility created by user pointbiz, that I had a lot of input on during its creation.

It will not create from a passphrase, but he says he's working on that.  I am dangling a 10BTC 1oz silver coin in front of him as bounty if he adds a few features to that (the ability to create two-part paper wallets would be nice as well).

Thing I want to know is how do I build a farraday cage with materials I can easily find? Where in the UK can I find these materials without too much trouble? How's the bitcoin network coping with the increased solar activity recently (solar flare)? I'm not sure what will happen in UK apart from the Northern lights in London (as it's normally in scotland,Northern England and near the Arctic).

I wish to protect my 2 computers,phone,DAB alarm clock,e.t.c (too many to list here) from solar flares.What are the chances that all my gear will be fried and worthless?

A Faraday cage is not what you are looking for, you want power surge suppressors and line conditioners. Solar flares affect 100km power lines, which act like big antennas. They don't affect your personal electronics to any notable degree (unless you are in space).

http://di1-2.shoppingshadow.com/images/pi/61/69/f2/20915567-450x450-0-0_Belkin+SurgeMaster+Maximum+Series+F9M823UK2M.jpg

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage)

I would think that the wire mesh used on screen doors would do fine. Seems like overkill, but whatever you feel you need.

Personally, I'm not worried about the solar activity. I have my computers plugged into surge protectors, and have backups of my wallets on paper and/or CD as well as electronic media. If the problems from the flares get too severe, I don't think spending bitcoins would be on my "must get to" list anytime soon.

That's wierd,I was told that solar flares fry all electronics (like the predicted superstorm would in 2012 later this year) and that surge protectors were useless and that only farraday cages were effective.How is a power surge supressor/line conditioner different from a regular surge protector? Also what do line conditioners do?

Everything I own uses very sensitive electronics (even my 'simple' LED torch has them,unfortunately.Tip is,get a bulb torch instead as they are more 'hardy').List of things I have that have very sensitive electronics (this may be a long list so I won't be mentioning too much here:
1.Mi-fi (Wi-fi 3G mobile broadband pocket router)
2.2x mobile phones (1 is a spare when the battery dies in my main phone)
3.LED torch
4.2 computers (1 PC,1 MBP)
5.All chargers
6.Bluetooth headset
and too many other thing to list here.Can Solar flares affect battery operated electronics? If not,then 1/3 of my things will be safe (except my MBP probably).

Any advice/tips would be appreciated.Also I'd like to invite someone to write about solar flare preparedness on my blog as many other sites promise to give tips but then don't or give wrong info.I'd like to invite an expert on the topic to write a post about it for me on my blog,thanks.If interested please PM me,thanks.

You would just make a fool of yourself. Most computer cases are actual faraday cages, if properly grounded (and within there are plenty more, hdds for instance). Not to protect against external radiation but to shield you against EM emission from within the case.

Now "cosmic bombardment". Those very fast protons hit our atmosphere (causing nice looking aurorae) and decay mostly to muons at ground level. Bad news, there is no reasonable way to avoid them. Even if you put your safe deep beyond a mountain, they will get ya.

It would be trivial to make a utility that takes a wallet.dat and spits out all the private keys in printable form, directly to the printer perhaps.  In a roundabout way, I have already made one, that I use when I recover people's corrupted wallets.

This simple utility looks for the byte sequence "04 20" inside wallet.dat, and treats the next 32 bytes as a Bitcoin private key.  While this will sometimes catch byte sequences that aren't really private keys, the side effects are minimal - just an extra bloat of a few phantom private keys that have no value.  The amount of C code needed to do this would literally fit on one average sized screen.  The only caveat is that the wallet must not be encrypted.

Those 32 key bytes can be printed out verbatim (hexadecimal), or converted into Sipa wallet import format along with a QR code for easy printing and import.  The average wallet will have lots of them, and also there will be duplicates that should be removed if they are extracted using this method.  But otherwise it would definitely work.

The coronal mass ejection started interacting with Earth's magnetic field 12 hours ago (http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/News012312-M8.7.html), mass mayhem has not ensued. (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204624204577181434101528186.html) There is no predicted "superstorm" (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012-superFlares.html), the sun goes through a normal 11-year cycle of activity.

Changing magnetic fields and moving charged particles can induce currents; however, solar storms are global-scale events, and the primary concern is the electrical grid. DC currents can be excited in power lines that normally carry AC-only, causing problems with transformers and substations. Your individual worries would be power bumps if substations automatically switch off or reroute the power grid, causing unclean power pulses or brownouts to your devices. A power conditioner is a high-end device that keeps a constant 240v to your devices - it is like a 240vac power supply that runs off the line current (most cheap battery backups don't do this - they only switch in during an outage or significant voltage drop). A surge suppressor keeps damaging voltage spikes from your devices. These happen primary from lightning strikes, but may happen from power grid malfunction, such as power lines sagging from the heat of carrying extra current and shorting on trees.

pywallet does exactly this ^ does it not?  You can browse your wallet import/export private keys etc.

Fixed that for ya.  Not even the crazies think that RFI from a computer is harmful to humans any more, but the FCC takes a dim view of anything that interferes with licensed radio systems.  They'd fine the sun for harmful interference if they could.

And my understanding was that muons were just a tiny bit harder to stop than beta rays, since they have the same electrical interactions, just a (lot) more mass.  The real problem is X-rays (or gamma rays, or cosmic rays, depending on which decade your physics textbook was written in), since they can penetrate and ionize.

But that is mostly a problem for solid state storage, which brings us back to deepceleron's point, that the real protection needed is on the power line.

Hmm.  I wonder if my coil winder is big enough to make a ferroresonant transformer big enough for the whole house.

Check out Armory (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=56424). It has that, plus a buttload of other cool features.

Like a "watch only wallet" that has only the public keys in it. So you can keep track of the transactions that go to the wallet, but the private key is on another (offline) computer, or possibly just printed out on a piece of paper. It also supports offline transactions. Still in alpha though.

I don't think you guys fully comprehend what a solar storm can do:

It was frying UNPLUGGED simple telegraph systems in 1859, what do you think it would do to a modern computer, ipad or iphone?   It would fuse their circuits.

Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases even shocking telegraph operators.[6] Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire.[7] Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.[8]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

The advice given about just putting a surge protector would be fine for the storm that hit yesterday and today...  maybe an X1 flair (the next one up)  but anything bigger than that and your in for an ugly surprise if that is all you did.   I love what it does to paper if it's near a machine... like freaking kindling.

This is what a typical early telegraph circuit looks like:
http://www.vias.org/albert_ecomm/img/albert_elect_comm-639.png

and at the end of hundreds of miles of very large gauge copper wire you had a sounder that looks like this (this is 1900, 40 years newer than the event):
http://images.marketplaceadvisor.channeladvisor.com/hi/15/15147/westernelectric1900_relay1a.jpg


At one end of the long wire there is a six volt battery, and a switch that connects it to the line. At the other is a sensitive electromagnet coil that makes a sound. They are both connected to earth ground. When nobody is pressing the key on the other end, the circuit works more like "antenna for picking up currents from magnetic fields, and channelling them through very fine wire in a small coil, until it burns". If there is a large induced current in the wire or a large ground potential difference, you don't need the battery - the current already wants to flow through the wire.


Now our long power lines carry 400KV instead of a few volts, and they have equipment at the end that looks more like this:
http://www.energy.siemens.com/co/pool/hq/power-transmission/high-voltage-substations/air-insulated-switchgear/110kV-Schaltanlage1-large.jpg

Some of the failed telegraph systems were disconnected from their power supplies, not from the telegraph lines. If you hooked up a today's computer to the telegraph lines of 1859, it would eventually get fried. If you hooked up a computer to today's power and telephone lines, it would almost never get fried just because of solar flares. Lightning strikes - maybe; solar flares - almost never. If you are worried about solar flares frying your computers like the 1859 telegraphs, you might as well start worrying about meteorites crashing into your home (happens all the time, right?). Keep in mind - every effort we spend on addressing these kinds of concerns is the effort not spent on something else. With that in mind, I'm out of here.

It is sad that NASA had to make a 2012 end of the world page (http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/2012.html) explaining why dummies are.

LOL no one is stating end of the world...  in fact the majority of my concern is localized....  but here's some examples,  some far more recent than the Carrington Event that burned unplugged telegraphs to the ground.

On March 13, 1989 a severe geomagnetic storm caused the collapse of the Hydro-Québec power grid in a matter of seconds as equipment protection relays tripped in a cascading sequence of events.[2][11] Six million people were left without power for nine hours, with significant economic loss. The storm even caused aurorae as far south as Texas.[3] The geomagnetic storm causing this event was itself the result of a coronal mass ejection, ejected from the Sun on March 9, 1989.[12] The minimum of Dst was -589 nT.

In 2003 The Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) operated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was offline for approximately 30 hours due to the storm.[17] The Japanese ADEOS-2 satellite was severely damaged and the operation of many other satellites were interrupted due to the storm.[18]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_storm

I am by no means saying a power grid shutdown in Canada cutting power to six million people is the end of the world,  but it IS a problem...  I just believe that our systems should be more shielded,  in focus there should be some protection of bitcoins because the VAST majority of them are digital and digital only (though I do like some of the stuff that casascius is building,  it still represents only a tiny fraction of the ~ 8 million bitcoins in existence).

if a solar storm did wipe some machines and backups at Mt. Gox for example ,  it could potentially cause a loss of a large number of bitcoins and affect day to day growth of bitcoins in general.

Is it the end of the world,  not even close... most likely it would be a growth opportunity as those affected areas would need to purchase new machines, hardware, etc...  but in the short and mid range it would be problematic.

It doesn't take voodoo from the sky to knock out power to hundreds of thousands in a technology-dense area with newer infrastructure: http://www.king5.com/news/local/Puget-Sound-Energy-may-give-50-credit-for-outage-137957953.html
My guess is that the death toll doesn't include many bitcoins.

that was terrible weather that did that...  what I am saying is that for minimal cost...  we should rule out the once in a century or two type solar storm...    

Do I think it's going to happen in the next few months?  Most likely not...

Do I think that the additional 20 bucks (2/3 BTC) for people to make a simple faraday cage and throw a USB with a wallet.dat and maybe some copies of needed digital files.... if we know a storm is coming?   Yes I do...

honestly that's the extent of what I believe....

from my standpoint,  I paid some additional money to have a faraday cage for one of our backup safes...  I figured the low cost to build it outweighed the cost of having to deal with it if something bad did happen...

Faraday cages need to be grounded.

Yes they do :)

a typical grounding wire suffices as long as it's attached to something robustly grounded.

They sure don't.  Jesus. I'm done here.

http://www.magnet.fsu.edu/education/tutorials/tools/images/faradaycage.gif

"we store all the bitcoins sent to cold storage in a vault that is a faraday cage shielded to protect against something like this." Run, bitcoins, run!

#!/bin/bash
for i in {0..999..1}
  do
     echo "Wallet Copy $i..."
     cp ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat /mnt/SDcard/wallet.$i
 done
echo "Just backed up wallet to SD card 1000 times.
echo "One of those will probably be good."

The metal layers are grounded to dissipate any electric currents generated from the external electromagnetic fields and thus block a large amount of the electromagnetic interference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage


However you're not completely wrong...

If a charge is placed inside an ungrounded Faraday cage, the internal face of the cage will be charged (in the same manner described for an external charge) to prevent the existence of a field inside the body of the cage. However, this charging of the inner face would re-distribute the charges in the body of the cage. This charges the outer face of the cage with a charge equal in sign and magnitude to the one placed inside the cage. Since the internal charge and the inner face cancel each other out, the spread of charges on the outer face is not affected by the position of the internal charge inside the cage. So for all intents and purposes, the cage will generate the same electric field it would generate if it was simply charged by the charge placed inside.

If the cage is grounded, the excess charges will go to the ground instead of the outer face, so the inner face and the inner charge will cancel each other out and the rest of the cage would remain neutral.

----

Ours is grounded.

If a powerfull solar storm hits the Earth, our Bitcoins will be our last concern. Believe me, people will burn dollars and euros just to warm soup.

The remaining Bitcoin hashporwer will be much easier to do a 51% attack... So, the blockchain will be gone...