Bitcoin Forum

Hi fellow bitcoiners,

everyone's telling you to encrypt your wallet these days (with good reason!) and with tools like FreeOTFE for Windows/Mac users that's easy to do. More experienced Unix/Linux users will probably resort to dm-crypt/cryptsetup encrypted volumes.

What's been missing is a less techy tutorial for the Linux user who wants an easy setup with GUI password dialogs and no need to fire up terminals every now and then.

If that sounds like you, you're the audience I wrote this HowTo for: :) http://bitcoin.blog.com/2011/07/17/linux-bitcoin-wallet-encryption/ (http://bitcoin.blog.com/2011/07/17/linux-bitcoin-wallet-encryption/)

Hope you'll find it useful, feedback much appreciated!

Here's my formula.  I expect it would work the same on Windows with reasonably full cygwin installed, but have not had occasion to try it.  I didn't feel like dicking with public key crypto and installing software that other people compiled and so forth.

I do this when I want to squirrel away an entire savings wallet with {n} number of coins in it.


1) bitcoind stop     (However it is done on your client.)

2) cat ~/.bitcoin/wallet.dat | openssl enc -aes-256-cbc -salt > ~/wallet.dat__whatever.enc

3) wipe .bitcoin/wallet.dat    (better than a simple 'rm' which a competent attacker can possibly re-find.)


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Before I remove my wallet, I actually do do some sanity checks.  Such as:

1)  sha256 .bitcoin/wallet.dat

2)  cat ~/wallet.dat__whatever.enc | openssl enc -d -aes-256-cbc -salt | sha256

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I use a pretty good password and am comfortable putting the entire encrypted wallet in a public area.

I really like Unix because it is so damn _easy_.  Really!  GUI software really does confuse the heck out of my and as often as not just does not do what I wish it to do.  After learning a few basic principles, the simple command line tools really are super easy and really flexible.  That is my opinion.