unless you can restore a wallet some other way than:
1. start up electrum
2. When it asks if you are creating a new wallet or restoring, you pick "Restore wallet from seed" option.
3. type wallet seed words in correctly.
4. wait to connect wallet
or what am I missing?
Yes that is how it is done. So again what makes you feel your latest attempt was a proper restore while your previous attempts were not? Do you see familiar addresses in your wallet? |
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How can I tell if I have private keys.
I went into my btc online wallet on bitbargain and clicked on TXID for both transactions.
Will the private keys be in there?
Thanks for the address but i have no ideas of my passphrase, so they said they cannot help me.
Thanks
Are you using bitcoin-qt? If so your private keys are stored in wallet.dat. Edit: Did you buy BTC with bitbargain and transfered them to your wallet? If not I am sure your coins are sitting in your bitbargain wallet. Hi I am using bitcoin qt. I did buy the coins from bitbargain. I still have the info related to the transactions. How do I get my private keys out of wallet.dat I cannot open wallet.dat, I just get a windows error message. I have two files called honeyletter.dat, honeyletter is my bitbargain name. Does this mean all is not lost? I'm really in bits about this, even though I dont have many btc, i dont wanna lose them Thanks so far. I apprciate your help. The very purpose of encrypting the wallet is to encrypt the private keys. The private keys are essentially all you need to spend your coins. In other words if you have encrypted your wallet and don't know the pass phrase then, I am sorry to say, you are in trouble. By default the wallet is stored as the wallet.dat file in the bitcoin data directory. The location of that directory depends on your operating system: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Data_directory |
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I have properly restored my wallet and it's running right now, but there are NO transactions in history and no BTC on balance.
Previously you said you had restored the wallet 10 times from seed. So what makes it a "proper restore" this time? |
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From what I've read here and on reddit, offline wallets are as vulnerable to allowing btc to disappear as much or more than 3rd party online solutions with a good track record.
No they are not. |
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Just wanted to post a warning about bitstamp. I deposited 13 bitcoin when price was around 200 and haven't logged in since. I logged in yesterday and saw that a sell order was executed 30 minutes after I deposited the coins. I am 99.9999% certain that I did not do this, and I was counting on having those coins as BTC in my account, so I'm sure you understand I was very disappointed to see this sale which cost me over 9000 dollars in lost relative value.
I don't know if this was a glitch - I had always had good experiences with bitstamp until now, or if somebody smelled the rally coming and just decided to trade my coins for fiat without asking me.
I suppose yes it's my fault for storing bitcoin in an online exchange, and now I know I should have listened to all that "trust no one" advice, but I just want to put this warning out there so maybe someone can benefit from it.
Might sound like an odd question but is the money from that sale in your bitstamp account or has somebody withdrawn it?? If the money is there then it must have been you who sold the coins and then forgot. |
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Not finished testing and stuff, got too much trouble with my other bounty  But I'll definitely need an address from you  Hi, 13aoLuhzgT18vCf8FQiUYhRgoWvgJMfxNa, thanks. Just some reminders to anyone that considers using this: by using it you are trusting that the server running this code is not storing a copy of the private key and/or at least n shares. By using GPG encryption you remove the issue where the server could be, knowingly or not, storing emails in plain text, and also, of course, protects yourself when receiving the emails. On the other hand there is a good amount of convenience here, the escrow is only required to engage in the process if there is some kind of dispute between the seller and the buyer (in the standard n = 2, m = 3). The buyer just needs to make a standard transaction to a newly generated bitcoin address. After confirming the seller has done his part, the buyer gives his share to the seller which allows him to obtain a private key for the address used. If the seller doesn't act, e.g. doesn't send a product, the escrow can just give his key share to the buyer, which will be able to regain access to the bitcoins sent. If the buyer pays but doesn't give his share (for whatever reason, like not knowing he has to do that), the escrow can just give his share to the seller instead. In all the cases, no single person has access to the funds. This is close to what is mentioned in the emails sent, by the way. Does it have "state"? I mean does it keep track of the progress behind an escrow deal and allow for recovery in case something goes wrong? For example one common scenario is that one or more of the parties did not receive the email or it ended up in their spam box and they can't find it. |
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Who the hell puts 90 BTC in a web wallet? I had ~0.13 BTC there and I'm waiting to get it back as I think BIPS is a little bit trustworthy. But I can also learn to finally switch out from web wallets, get an Android and install Electrum on it instead of using web wallet even for cents.
Sorry to read this. I've seen you in the Electrum forums and you're always helping people. I hope you get your coins back. |
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i thought about that also but then i thought, if he boots from the disk and makes is keypairs and then reboots his computer back to its normal partition without ever connecting to the internet, it should be fine for that purpose. No. If he's booting from a malicious CD/DVD then all sorts of things could happen. Some scenarios: - Malware gets installed on his hard drive. - The random number generator on the DVD is such that it produces deterministic numbers that the malware author can predict. Meaning any private keys you generate could also be generated by the malware author and he could steal your coins. Ideally when you get the DVD you should do a md5sum to confirm it is the same as c4f4c7a0d03945b78e23d3aa4ce127dc *ubuntu-12.04.3-desktop-i386.iso http://releases.ubuntu.com/precise/MD5SUMSTwo last questions: 1- I saw a topic, where the guy generated a key from bitaddress and when he was about to send coins he discovered it was already an address and it had 50btc on it so he could have access to them. I think the post was old though and it's really possible that the bug was fixed. Could that be an issue? 2- I tought about setting a brainwallet for my keys. What you think is better? Setting a really hard passphrase or just printing out normal keys and hiding them in safe? Oh and one last thing  . When I shut down my computer and restart it, will ubuntu still be running or will I be able to keep using windows as before? Thanks 1. Personally I would not use bitaddress. IMO it is better to use bitcoin-qt or electrum. Both will require some fiddling though but more secure. 2. Electrum. Brainwallets where you pick your own passphrase are a VERY BAD idea. Electrum will generate a truly random 12 word passphrase. You will get windows after the restart. But if you have linux swap partitions Ubuntu may write to them. |
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Thanks a lot, Rannasha & Abdussamad. Very helpful answers!
If it's okay with you I'll split the tip (in which case I still need your address, Abdussamad).
Ok thanks: 13m4SSVYXHdiA5jQM3i1w44UtPQj2yMwp2 |
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You actually can't trust any internet connection. The encryption used in your private wifi network is designed to prevent unauthorized persons from leeching your bandwidth. It won't magically make the Internet at large a safe place. It doesn't change the fact that you are connected to the global, wild west, free for all that is the Internet.
That is why we have firewalls, HTTPS, GPG etc. because we can't trust the network. So WiFi, wired, public or private doesn't matter. Whether it is properly encrypted or not does.
One follow-up question: The corollary to what you said would be that I am safe (no matter what wifi network I use) if I connect to a site via HTTPS (and the certificate is valid). Did I get that right? Yes. I was about to edit my answer and clarify that. Of course there are caveats to that as well. If someone else has installed a different set of CA certificates on YOUR system then even invalid certs would show up as valid. For example: a legitimate use case of this is when companies do this to their employee's systems to make the company's self-signed certs for internal systems appear valid. |
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Question (1.1) How safe am I from attacks during runtime, that are based on OS vulnerabilites, or programs that run on my computer. Assume that an attacker has *no physical* access to my machine, but knows my IP address and attempts to target me. My knowledge of Linux isn't particularly deep, so I don't know if I'm correct in my belief that a properly patched Linux distribution like the one I'm using is more or less 'safe' from, for example, trojans/software keyloggers, etc. How safe am I really, and what can I do to be safer? Make sure you have a firewall up and running. Disable the open SSH server if you don't use it. If you do use it enable public key authentication and disable password authentication and remote root login. Install chkrootkit and rkhunter and run scans regularly. To protect your wallet you can place it under a different user account than the one you are using for your other activities. That means create a new user, login and create a new electrum wallet (just run electrum while logged in as that user. make sure you backup the seed) and transfer all your coins to an address in the new wallet. For convenience sake you can create a new watch only wallet under your regular user account. This will allow you to hand out addresses, view transactions and balances using your regular user account but will require you to switch users to spend any coins. (2) Bitcoin client security questions
I'm using Electrum. The electrum wallet is protected by a strong password.
Question (2.1) How safe am I using Electrum as my client? I understand that Electrum is not completely trustless because I don't have a full copy of the blockchain and rely on servers that I need to trust. So how likely are attacks on me via my choice of client? For example, is there any chance I could be connected to a "dishonest" Electrum server, who will be able to re-direct my btc transaction, or double spend?
Electrum is fine. The downsides are given below: Electrum servers can't double spend your transactions. They can *not* broadcast them though. And they can give you fake data about transactions that never took place. But your private keys are entirely within your control. If you are worried about the authenticity of transaction data just double check it on blockchain.info. Also you loose out on privacy because all your addresses are revealed to the servers. (3) Network security
There are two scenarios in which I would possible use Electrum, or trade on a Bitcoin exchange webpage: at home, and at a public place.
Question (3.1) How safe am I when I am connected to my own WiFi network at home, which is WPA2 secured? Is there a plausible chance someone in the vicinity could intercept and decrypt my communication (i.e. break WPA2), and get for example access to the account data at my exchange? (please assume again a sufficiently strong password was set at both the exchange, and for my WiFi network)
Question (3.2) How safe is a *public* WiFi connection? Assume the WiFi connection itself is *unsecured*, but the webpage I'm using is reached via https. I'm sorry to be so clueless, but I don't really know if in that case my communication with the exchange webpage is in clear text or not? Can someone (the network admin of the unsecured network, or someone else eavesdropping) intercept my communication with the exchange website in clear text and interfere with it?
You actually can't trust any internet connection. The encryption used in your private wifi network is designed to prevent unauthorized persons from leeching your bandwidth. It won't magically make the Internet at large a safe place. It doesn't change the fact that you are connected to the global, wild west, free for all that is the Internet. That is why we have firewalls, HTTPS, GPG etc. because we can't trust the network. So WiFi, wired, public or private doesn't matter. Whether it is properly encrypted or not does. |
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Many laptops that ship with Windows 8 are incompatible with Windows 7, the manufacturer doesn't have drivers available. This is the worst, because even if you want to install Windows 7, you can't. Check the manufacturer's support page for that laptop model, and be sure that it has more than only Windows 8 drivers for download. Windows 8 is not bad for running Bitcoin, it is just bad. If you want to run full Bitcoin-Qt, it will be painfully slow on a laptop; it works best on a fast PC with a SSD. If you use a light client like Electrum, the speed of your computer doesn't matter so much. If you use a web wallet (not advised), you can use your phone's web browser. Electrum works on Android too. Never tried it myself but it's supported. |
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danystatic take a closer look at the documentation of bitcoind. IT is possible to configure it so that it runs a command when it sees a transaction. So you can have it GET your script each time that happens. Of course you need to put it some authentication system in place to ensure your script is not being called by an outside user pretending to be bitcoind.
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Okay guys you are right and my haste is what got me here in first place. However I have my seed and have restored 10+ times and tried it all I'm thinking. but lets got step by step.
So from the beginning:
Where do we start?
I have a screean shot of the actual words when I first got them, so what info do you need?
As mentioned before you must *never* reveal the seed to anyone. First do you have a working PC? What machine are you using to restore the wallet from the seed? When you restore via the seed do you see a) all the transactions or b) some of the transactions? Also is the balance accurate? Do you see the address you sent the coins to in the list of addresses on the receive tab? |
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You haven't kept up with recent world events have you? In case you didn't know the NSA has been spying on the whole planet and is up to no good.
Really? A spy agency spies on people? That's a socker  Seriously talking rigged encryption algorithms might be true but the nsa inventing bitcoins is unlikely to say the least, and noone's biggest fear whatsoever. It's big enough to get at least one of the core developers investigating (or at least wondering): https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=289795.msg3270483#msg3270483 |
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The biggest fear is that Bitcoin is just some elaborate project by the NSA to capture the entire world's wealth. They could enslave us if this is the case.
Not sure if sarcastic or if i have to wear my tinfoil hat  You haven't kept up with recent world events have you? In case you didn't know the NSA has been spying on the whole planet and is up to no good. Is it that hard to imagine that the a shadowy US secret agency that employs the best cryptographers in the world would want us to store our wealth in crypto currency for it's own nefarious purposes? |
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