If you want proof of "I can spend coins associated with this address", you can sign a message with the address (or specifically with the private key whose public key hashes to the hash encoded by an address).
Yes, that's the correct answer. Paper Wallet? Show an edited picture of the printed paper wallet with covered private key and prvkey's QR code. There are too many workaround to fake this like printing a bitcoin-loaded address paired with a random prv key but, Paper Wallets' private keys are meant to be hidden and offline, the user didn't want to tell others that he own a bitcoin in the first place. With this, leave Paper Wallets out of the available options.
LOL - on the last two....
No, LOL to this: E. Show the requestor your private key and it's value therein.
Other wallets? achow101 already replied with the best answer.Yes, (E) is pretty funny. Note that I pose both an interesting and practical question. You might want to meet up with someone from Localbitcoins to make a purchase, or want to sell something with bitcoin. Is the other party capable of making the transaction? It's not uncommon in many transactions to require "show proof of funds." |
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Its inherently difficult to prove the sole ownership of your Bitcoins. A,B,C,E,F,G requires trust on either or both of the party and D just won't be sufficient.
The most accurate way is to sign a message with the address and the message must contain relevant information. However, this would just prove that you could have control of the address and the BTC associated with it. It is of course, possible for them to get someone else to sign a message using their address.
C does not require trust, does it? A person verifies a public address, then he sees that one bitcoin has moved to a new address, that was previously specified by you. There is no way he could know whether you were the sole owner of the old address. Now, how could a proof be devised that you owned the new address? |
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How would you prove it?
The bitcoin might be in an online wallet, a hardware wallet, a software wallet, or a paper wallet. You pick.
Here are some ideas to start.
A. Show a public key that has the bitcoin.
B. Show a public key that has the bitcoin, and show that you can move a token amount to and from this address.
C. Show a public key that has the bitcoin, and you move 1 bitcoin to a new address.
D. Transfer the bitcoin to a wallet that is multi-key, the person that wants to know has part of the key.
E. Show the requestor your private key and it's value therein.
F. Transfer to bitcoin to a Reputable and Esteemed Holder of Assets, such as a Swiss Bank, who would then Vouch for Your Bitcoin.
G. The person asking for proof is required to have Faith that you have correctly stated you have a bitcoin.
LOL - on the last two....
Now if you have difficulty, don't despair. You are certain to have LESS DIFFICULTY than a nation has proving they have value in their paper money.
Hint: The correct answer is not listed above.
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Mostly websites recommend you to write your mnemonic phrases or backups but I don't think is a safety habit. For years, what I do is to copy and paste it in microsoft word document. I password protect it and then send it to my own email that is secured with a google 2fa and my phone number. In such a case, I walk with my backup wherever I go, and it will take miracle for anyone to get break into.
There are 18,000 ways your method can and has been hacked. Just one example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ZdTP8erZE0 |
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Here's a total paranoid way of storing it. It was (and probably still is) used a lot for message coding by intelligence services of many countries, so old, but still effective. Take a book. Any book you like. Find all the words your mnemonic phrase contains. Mark their location using page-paragraph-word number combination, ie 120826 would mean page 12, paragraph 8, word 26. As a result you will have a series of 6 digit numbers which you are free to store on your Google drive, email to yourself or paint on your roof  Without knowing what the key book is no one will be able to decipher it. Actually there's a bit more to it than that. Not "any book you like" but "any book you can get an exact page for page, word by word" copy of anytime in the future. For example the first edition of Heinlien , The Moon is a Harsh Mistress." First editions are really good for this purpose. For a famous book these are not going to be cheap, a couple hundred USD or so. |
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OK, this would sound noobish but I'm interested to know how other people keep the mnemonic phrase generated by the wallet. I do have the wallets secured with a pw and backed up (still not enough to warrant a hardware wallet) but I also have the passphrases handwritten in paper (someone said be wary of printers) and stashed somewhere but I'm wondering if there's a better way to keep them.
I don't know any cryptography but I'm thinking of shuffling the words rather than writing them down in order. Like a 12x12 grid where I'd spread them out in certain patterns and then finished with filler words. Since it's no longer as straight-forward should anyone get their hands on it, I think it would finally be safer to keep digital copies of it. Any suggestions?
very interesting topic . i will convert mnemonic phrases to arabic numerals . each word as a group . each letter as a unit . such as :" good day" it is "[7, 15,15,4][4,1,25]" the numbers are the order of letters in the alphabet . you can also assign a specific number to each letter . Very briefly, may I explain why each of these is a bad idea? Cryptographic security is not a new topic and anything you think up has like been thought up decades ago and critiqued. Actually the 12x12 grid is a variation of an old technique. Why not just read about and use industry standard methods? |
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Since other posters already suggested good ideas, I'd like to share one sort of "unorthodox" way of storing your mnemonic phrases.
Memorize it. Yes, you heard that right. A 12-word recovery seed is a lot easier to memorize that most people thought(though memorizing 24-word seed is still possible, just significantly harder). But I understand that this is definitely not for everyone.
This is very wrong because you can easily forget it Hence the reason why I said "this is definitely not for everyone". As someone who has just for fun memorized card decks and just to prove he could do it memorized four decks, I strongly advise against this. Yes this is a method which is usable for a person with a trained memory. But for people who do not even know what that means, it is an extremely bad idea. |
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Perfect, I will read the article.
It seems that the different points that you give me are very interesting.
I will search a couple of information about this and I come back soon.
Thank you a lot!
You may well have already done this, but I recommend reading and using references from Satoshi's 2007 nine page paper. That was the paper that laid out the concepts of blockchain (as used with bitcoin), and by no means is it obsolete. |
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Just a question how come tickets for conferences are so "sell your kidney" prices.
I know there are tonnes of speakers that you have to pay for etc.
but conferences are meant for learning of crypto, how would that be attractive to the average person etc?
Most of these conferences are pretty much worthless, you are not missing out. Go to Youtube and look for the real movers and shakers. |
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Still jealous of all the people that heard about bitcoin 2-6 years ago. How lucky they are!!! Why non of that new bitcoin millionaires havenīt started any charity projects? ...
This rubs me the wrong way, please let me take a moment to explain why. What will put many people stuck in hopeless poverty, such as those in sub Saharan Africa, out of that state is not donations and charity projects. Rather it is the protocols of cryptocurrencies and bitcoin, which will be instrumental in this. But regardless, you seem to have little knowledge and massive presumptions about the things "bitcoin millionaires" have and have not done. |
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I guess it kinda goes to show you that the only un-hackable piece of technology is your good old fashioned brain! Bring back the brain wallets!
Random speculation does NOT constitute realistic threats to security. Random speculation does not support a theory of weakness against threats. |
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I lost about $200 using shapeshift and Exodus Team only made excuses they refused to admit anything went wrong or refund my money so USE SHAPESHIFT AT YOUR OWN PERIL!!! I used it once before and I bought $500 worth of Bicoin Cash using Bitcoin and that wentt as expected and I lost about $20 for the tranfer fees which was about what I expected but a month later prices were down and I tried to buy back bitcoin using the BITCOIN CASH which was now worth $400 and some change and I already had $1100 in Bitcoin so after tranfer I expected about $1500 in Bitcoin but all I got was $1300 and lost $200 in the transfer!!! I also had another time when I tried to buy Ethereum with 3 litecoin and the shapeshift failed. Afterwards I was missing 2 of the 3 LITECOIN!!! I complained about this and the other transfers and they also made excuses and did nothing but three days later the LITECOIN Mysteriously REAPPEARED in my wallet thank god... But they never admitted anything and they refused to re-imburse me for the $200 I lost during that shapeshift from Cash back to Coin. I'm seriously thinking of starting a class action against Exodus I wonder how many others like me are missing money from SHAPESHIFT???
Pretty certain you don't have a case here. First of all, Exodus is not at fault. Shapeshift is the provider of the exchange, they have hundreds of sites and services plugged into Shapeshift via API. Secondly, you should have a clear picture of how much you get in units of BTC, not fiat. Perhaps you did receive what was worth closer to $400 but that value's changed as BTC price changes. Thirdly, every time you use Shapeshift, you get a published exchange rate before you confirm. Shapeshift on Exodus has terrible rates, so I'm not surprised you lost a lot changing there. Next time you want a better rate, head over to an exchange and trade it manually. P.S. Shouldn't have hijacked this almost too old to look at thread. Open a complaint, and provide details with evidence. Ranting like this won't help you. An exchange API called by a mobile device wallet is insecure and unsatisfactory in numerous ways. |
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you use a QR code to move the pre-signed transaction from the air gapped computer which has no access to internet in anyway.....
QR-Codes are like a red flag to a bull and says "Read me, i am a password" to the O/S .... But this is ridiculous. SO WHAT? That's information you want to be transferred. This discussion is falling into the logical error of the "Irrefutable Hypothesis." |
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Might point is for Bitcoin to be adopted for wide usage it needs to be as easy/convenient to use as current centralized options.
Bitcoin already is adopted for wide usage. It has FAR more usage now than it did in 2013. It had FAR more usage in 2013 than it did in 2009. That's WHY we are talking about scaling and the related issues, BECAUSE bitcoin continues to be adopted for wider usage. Build useful tools, the market will find ways to use those tools. It is impossible to know what people will be doing in 10 or 20 years. Any attempt to predict the future of technology is futile. All we can do is build ever better tools that provide more options and then wait to see what the market does with those tools. LN is just another tool providing yet another option. Many people WILL be online when they are making their transactions. As such, THOSE people will have LN as a low cost option to take nearly instant transactions off-chain without a centralized third party. Doing so will free up space in the blockchain for those that need/desire a decentralized solution while they are offline, reducing congestion and cost on the blockchain. Furthermore, as you've already pointed out, the "average person will choose to trust a third party". For low risk transactions and small values there are MANY people that will gravitate to centralized solutions for exchanging Bitcoin value. Those transactions ALSO will not be on the blockchain and will free up space for those that need/desire it. There is no reason to think that additional tools won't be developed in the future to improve the scaling even more. Perhaps someday everyone will be using Bitcoin every day. Perhaps Bitcoin will never be more than a niche currency for special use cases. Perhaps Bitcoin will become a backbone for settlement between local providers of value exchange. The point is for bitcoin to be a decentralized, global, trustless, permissionless payment system. The market will decide the best use case for that system with the available tools at any moment in time. On-chain doesn't scale, which is why we have LN, but to send money to an offline counter-party you can't use LN, so those types of payments don't scale because they have to be on-chain.
LN scales just fine for online transactions..... Seems to me that OFFLINE transaction requires a ledger, if not blockchain then some similar product. Online LN has intrinsic privacy by not having that ledger. You can't have them both, and be capable of scaling. I admit that it's possible to conceive of some functionality that has a public ledger and privacy, etc. There's usually a way to stretch a technology and find a way forward. But we need to clearly conceptualize these issues, and their implications. |
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I don't really trust hardware wallets, that's why I don't own one. My main reason is the lack of open-source for example, Ledger wallet is only partial open-source. That means that there is still some code running on the hardware that you can't verify. Besides that, they are quite expensive compared to air-gapped machines that only require an old PC. I have more fate in a computer, without internet capability running a wallet compiled from source (Armory) than pre-configured hardware. Armory allows you to sign transactions on your air-gapped machine and managing your wallet on an online PC without sign access (watching-only).
They certainly add a level of convenience, especially for all of the coins the support. That's is certainly a benefit for people who store altcoins. But for my personal situation not, as I only store Bitcoin and some Litecoin. Also, a ledger nano s for example is much cheaper than any laptop/very cheap desktop you'd find, I don't think it's fair to assume that everybody would have an old computer lying around.
Even the old computers that schools have, will run an offline version of Armory. I bet you can get these for less than 10 bucks on a flea market or elsewhere. Also Armory has support for single board computers like the Raspberry Pi, that can be bought for $25. It's a hardware wallet with even better security and validity, but at a fraction of the cost. ..... Support for Armory has been weak for the OS X for some time, and future support for the MS version is not certain. However, note that Armory supports regeneration using a keyword sequence. And that page you print out can have an encryption key. So there is really no reason for the old PC, right? Yesterday's computers likely will not work on tomorrow's database. Armory requires a full copy of the CORE database, so the "old PC" will need something > 200 GB available. Since the CORE database is growing, any reasonable projection for the storage needs after say 5 years is what, maybe 500-800 GB? I was talking about the offline version. Windows and OSX still have full support for Armory, so I don't get what you're talking about. Storage for the full blockchain is not that expensive, one terabyte harddrives go for less than $40. Now if we can buy 1tb drives for <$40 what does this mean? That the $10 PC no longer does the job....which is what I said... Regardless, you are still doing it wrong "According to Armory." You print out a paper wallet with their word list and store that. In five or ten years time there may be expected many changes in wallets and PC operating systems. That's right, to have Armory fully up and running you also will need an online machine with quite some disk space. Meaning that the total costs won't be $10, however I was not talking about the full set-up for Armory but just the offline machine only. I like Armory for it's offline signing feature, which is easy and fast to use and that does not apply for a paper with the word list on it. I'm not here to argue. See bolded above those are easily verified facts. |
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Paper wallet in a safe deposit box ftw lol
A safety deposit box is only as safe as those working at the bank.  I would have to disagree with this. First of all, contents of a safe deposit box should be "tamper evident." Google that it will become clear that any prowling in that box can and should be detected. Yes that can include taking pictures of anyone opening the box, using a cam that doesn't look like a cam. Important contents should not be obvious. A paper wallet should not be on a piece of paper that shouts "BITCOIN KEYS." It might be engraved on something that looks like a family heirloom. Johnny's First Communication certificate. Etc. They could be on a page that looked like a listing of bank account numbers, split into pieces. These things would not stop a determined attacker that already knew you had a stash, so one additional level of security is needed. That is the encoding of the private key with a key phrase that only you know. At this point you have 1. A box that does not appear to have any bitcoin paper wallets. 2. one object of many in the box that has the keys or sequences. 3. The key needs another part that is not in the box. 4. The box has tamper evident contents, hence an intruder is detected. |
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I don't really trust hardware wallets, that's why I don't own one. My main reason is the lack of open-source for example, Ledger wallet is only partial open-source. That means that there is still some code running on the hardware that you can't verify. Besides that, they are quite expensive compared to air-gapped machines that only require an old PC. I have more fate in a computer, without internet capability running a wallet compiled from source (Armory) than pre-configured hardware. Armory allows you to sign transactions on your air-gapped machine and managing your wallet on an online PC without sign access (watching-only).
They certainly add a level of convenience, especially for all of the coins the support. That's is certainly a benefit for people who store altcoins. But for my personal situation not, as I only store Bitcoin and some Litecoin. Also, a ledger nano s for example is much cheaper than any laptop/very cheap desktop you'd find, I don't think it's fair to assume that everybody would have an old computer lying around.
Even the old computers that schools have, will run an offline version of Armory. I bet you can get these for less than 10 bucks on a flea market or elsewhere. Also Armory has support for single board computers like the Raspberry Pi, that can be bought for $25. It's a hardware wallet with even better security and validity, but at a fraction of the cost. ..... Support for Armory has been weak for the OS X for some time, and future support for the MS version is not certain. However, note that Armory supports regeneration using a keyword sequence. And that page you print out can have an encryption key. So there is really no reason for the old PC, right? Yesterday's computers likely will not work on tomorrow's database. Armory requires a full copy of the CORE database, so the "old PC" will need something > 200 GB available. Since the CORE database is growing, any reasonable projection for the storage needs after say 5 years is what, maybe 500-800 GB? I was talking about the offline version. Windows and OSX still have full support for Armory, so I don't get what you're talking about. Storage for the full blockchain is not that expensive, one terabyte harddrives go for less than $40. Last I heard Goatpig had a buddy who now and then would answer questions or do tech support for OS X ,and he did not have a test machine on which the OS X version of Armory could even be compiled. So as a long time Armory user I can't share your optimism on this eg. "full support." Now if we can buy 1tb drives for <$40 what does this mean? That the $10 PC no longer does the job....which is what I said... Regardless, you are still doing it wrong "According to Armory." You print out a paper wallet with their word list and store that. In five or ten years time there may be expected many changes in wallets and PC operating systems. |
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....
I have recently converted from a PC to a Mac (help me lord) and am having trouble getting 1.4.1 onto my device. I know this sounds a really noob question but would there be any reason my ledger would read the software differently if it was previously connected to a windows based app rather than ios?
It IS a different program, being compiled under OS X and relying on somewhat different underlying libraries. They say to use Google Chrome or Chromium as the browser, were you doing that? |
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Before I reply I would like to say that the ministry of Bitcoin propaganda runs this forum and keeps removing posts.
I looked into these air-gap bridges and you can download apps from play store that produce spectra graphs and you can
even send and receive cartoon like images using nothing more than sound.
Turns out that some TV adverts are using sound to communicate with apps ruining on "Smart Phone" so this is not science
fiction and is fact.
Developers should keep away from using any microsoft blackbox code and the same goes for google android code that's
all over our phones because "They" are years ahead of where we think they are when it comes to steeling our data.
The whole concept of "air gapped" is that the machine is usually, typically, 99% of the time turned off. If the design goal is to move coins only at the 5th year and the 10th year for one day each, I think it's reasonably safe. If the goal is to move funds every day, more careful study of the problem would be called for. |
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Paper wallet in a safe deposit box ftw lol
And if someone physically gets your paper wallet you lose the coins. Or you could have some technical problem when the day comes to use the coins. I would suggest, anyone that put a paper wallet in long term storage, see that a decoding program is placed there also. An example would be the bitaddress.org script. Whatever is needed. Toss an entire computer if you like, if you think that script won't run in ten years. Whatever you put into long term storage, remove the batteries first. |
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