For the full-page template, to help all designers coordinate and standardize, I was thinking something that looks like the design below, with cut marks and guide lines, scaled for US letter. I am not a designer, this is just for the concept and is horribly out of scale:



Something like that, in a vector, could be a template for all the designers and also for test-prints by the users to align their printers.

@Mystery Miner

I have some suppliers in the US west coast for printing, but cost depends on print run. I will be sourcing a (medium) 1000-5000 sheet run here.

The design I am proposing does not include pre-printed keys. The keys will be printed by each user at home, with offline software. I want to include detailed instructions for the users in the kit. Ideas are welcome!

I'm looking for creative input, for sure.


I would like to have 2 or 3 open licensed deisgns for people to choose. Therefore, they will all need standardized locations and sizes for the QRs and stuff.

I have found some great scratch-off security stickers. These can be peeled off a sheet, and stuck on top of the QR codes and key text. Once stuck, the adhesive cannot be removed without tearing and defacing the barcode. The scratch-off is transparent underneath, so once scratched you can scan the code. They are made for barcodes of course.

I've found many suppliers online, they all offer some variation of a 1" x 1", 1" x 2" or 2" x 2" for the US market. I'd like to hear about European suppliers, if someone can search. We need to find some sizes that have close equivalents in both metric and imperial, so that they can be sourced.

Here's an example: http://www.myscratchofflabels.com/square-rectangle-scratch-off-labels.html

Both the key hex and barcode for the private key need to be in a specific area so they can be completely covered, front and back (printed obscuring pattern on back)

For now, the aim is US Letter sheets, imperial measurements and proportions, and US-sized stickers.

If someone wants to work on A4, metric and metric stickers, let us know by replying! I am not a designer, so I do not know how hard it is to make one design work for both.

I would like the note to have FOUR areas:

Left, Middle, Right, Stub

Essentially, the existing designs have three areas (Left, Middle, Right), and need to be extended by 33%, to add a stub area

I do not care about "anti-counterfeiting" designs. They're pointless, since this will not need to resist counterfeiting. I like it to be similar to a banknote, but it must be clearly NOT money, so that professional printing houses don't freak out.  It will probably include a TEXT area for a disclaimer in the local language (in the US it will say in red "NOT LEGAL TENDER" somewhere on the border).

Here's my suggestion:

BEFORE anyone submits a design, we all agree on a TEMPLATE, which is a wireframe of an entire sheet, showing all the locations of the "blanks".

This TEMPLATE will also be open sourced and included in the kit. Think about it: You just bought 10 gorgeous sheets, quality printed on heavy paper. Do you really want to use one of those sheets to TEST your printers alignment??? Hell NO! So, I would include 5 printed template sheets in the kit on plain white paper, for testing your printing. I'll also include it as a PDF so that people can download and test their printers.



I hope this makes sense, waiting for feedback!

To solve this exact problem, I am making an open source kit for secure paper wallets.

It solves quite a few of these issues for you:

- Pre-printed sheets on high-quality paper, with nice design, BUT NO KEYS
- You feed sheets and print keys, using an offline generator
- PERFORATED so you can cut easily
- Kit comes with security stickers. These are opaque coatings, over transparent tamper proof sticker. Once it's on it cannot be removed without destroying. Or scratch-off to reveal the code
- Paper note has an optional tear-off stub with duplicated area for backup keys. You can print two copies of the keys, and store the tear-off stub in a second location

The whole thing will be open. You can buy it online as a kit, or you can use the same suppliers and print it yourself, or you can make a franchise and re-sell the kits.

Interested?

@gweedo: I'll be customizing bitaddress.org code as part of this bounty. I'm looking for some different designs, which will need to include a tear-off stub feature with a second set of keys.

I am aware of several very nice designs recently completed for another project, which did not win that competition.
If those can be open sourced they can be re-used for this project.

I am sponsoring a bounty of at least 5BTC (will adjust if necessary) to build an open source paper wallet kit.

Everything about the project will be open: graphics, code, website, suppliers etc, using Creative Common licenses.

The paper wallet is designed to be sold (by anyone) as a kit with the following characteristics:

- You print the keys so no one ever sees them
- The design will be pre-printed, double-sided on heavy weight cotton paper, blank spaces for keys
- The paper will come in sheets, micro-perforated to easily tear into neat individual notes
- Each note will have a stub with a second backup copy of the keys, for storage at a second location
- Each kit will come with an opaque security sticker that has a scratch-off coating, for covering the private keys
- Each kit will come with a custom version of the bitaddress.org code for printing your special paper wallets, and instructions

All of the above have been done one way or another. This is different for four reasons:

1. No pre-printed keys. Too insecure - cold storage can't be trusted on pre-printed keys
2. No ugly laser,  see-through paper, with scissor cuts. Designed for offset printing, on heavy stock in 1000+ sheet volume.
3. Great security features (security sticker, opacity, tear-off stub for backup etc.). All security features user-applied.
4. All open source, to encourage re-use, re-design, "franchising", re-sellers and UX standardization

The entire project will sit on github from inception, including graphics.

I will give the bounty based on community member feedback and votes, for maximum fairness. If anyone knows how to do escrow for a bounty, I'll do that too.

I am open to suggestions on modifying the project, bounty, process, design as necessary to get broad use and adoption. I am also open to co-sponsors for the bounty. I will sell these kits, but so can anyone else - completely open license.

Thank you any and all for reading!

[UPDATE: Repository for anything created or proposed https://github.com/aantonop/openpaperwallet ]

[UPDATE2: BOUNTY RAISED to 10BTC - 5BTC for winner, 2.5BTC each for two more runners-up ]

Very interesting.

You should open source even if it is early stage, please! I'd love to

I've done some Erlang and OTP and I'm looking at core-daemon (full node) implementations.

Don't be shy, open it!

I would like to re-use non-winning designs under a CC-SA or other open license, without copyright material.

I am willing to pay the original designers for their work, in BTC.

If anyone is willing to release their design under CC (replacing anything that is not suitably licensed with CC or public content), let me know. I am trying to figure out how to organize a bounty for the overall project, but there's good work here that can be used.

I will pay several BTC for the work already done, essentially.

I want to organize a bounty for a completely open project. By "open" I mean that the entire development, everything produced, suppliers, code, graphics, bids, rejected bids, ideas, everything will be licensed with a Creative Commons license.

The project is for a high quality paper wallet, and will require graphic design, a tiny bit of JavaScript coding, and some parts sourcing. I will do some of it myself and offer bounties for the things I can't do. This is NOT the bounty post, I'll do that next. Here I'm asking for advice on organizing a bounty.

I've seen other bounties where concerns were raised over payments and delivery, over licensing etc. I want to make this easy and open. I'm willing to do escrow, let the community pick the best designs, code, etc for the bounties, whatever it takes to make it successful and get maximum re-use of anything created.

Suggestions?

Unfortunately, from my experience of the entire event in real time, the only fact you got right about the "bug" was the part where you admitted you didn't understand it.

The decision was 100% correct. The path back to 0.7 was predictable. The path forward on an unannounced hard-fork would have been a disaster and taken weeks to stabilize. This was not about purity of vision or block size, but about undiscovered bugs in BDB.

In the end, the combined efforts of the developers and miners got the problem resolved in a distributed, efficient and effective manner through consensus. That only served to prove that the operations and operators of the infrastructure have also achieved some maturity and are contributing to a resilient bitcoin.

As strong and resilient currency is math + infrastructure + operations, because you won't always catch all the bugs or prevent all the real world disasters. So you need operations and resilient infrastructure. Because in the end, shit will happen and what matters is how it is handled. Not everything can be predicted or prevented. The rest you catch in triage.

Last week was an example of great execution, fast thinking and almost painless results in an unexpected, hard, live network test.

I give them an A.

Obviously some inside joke or pun?

It seems to be a response to people asking for money. Is that just a way of saying "look out - SCAM"?

Anyone can clarify the origin and meaning of the meme?

The most important passphrase you may ever generate for bitcoin, would be the passphrase for your brain wallet https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Brainwallet.

Since the balance and public key (address) of the brain wallet will be know and visible on the blockchain, brain wallets are prime targets for a dictionary attack, generating addresses from common words and phrases, until one is found that matches an address with a balance.

Naturally, many people will use their names, addresses, birthdays, children's names, highschool name, favorite team, klingon words, movie references etc. These people will lose their bitcoin. Don't be one of them.

There's a lot of good security advice all around these forums (and plenty of bad advice too).

This posting is to present some information about passwords and passphrases.

Most wallets, bitcoin websites, bitcoin exchanges and markets use passwords for security. Fortunately, many also offer additional security with two-factor authentication, since passwords are a poor security mechanism. Passwords should be used together with some form of alternative authentication, such as a hardware token (Yubikey, SecurID etc.), or one-time-password generator (SMS, Google Authenticator etc).

But, sometimes a password is all you can use, so you'd better make it good. The rules for good passwords, that are common wisdom are either wrong or contradictory. You can't do a random password that is long enough and not write it down. So how do you generate secure passwords that are strong, yet memorable?

One of the best approaches is to use a word-list to generate a passphrase instead of a password. Passphrases are both easier to remember and harder to crack. The words in a passphrase can also be concatenated by a period, dash or other character of your choice, making a long password which is very hard to crack.

One of my favorite geek artists XKCD explains it best in his Internet Classic http://xkcd.com/936/ comic

There are two ways to generate a good, strong and memorable passphrase:

Manual - Diceware is the manual and most secure way. You throw dice, selecting one word for each 5 dice-throws, from a predefined dictionary. See the complete explanation here: http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html

Automatic - The same concept, implemented entirely in Javascript in a client-side page. You can load it and use it to generate very secure passphrases offline. There are a few sites that do this, here's one: https://entima.net/diceware/

Hope you enjoyed!

[Getting to my newbie post-count up - this is a bit off-topic but I'd rather say something meaningful that spam for post-count]

If someone is looking to hire 3-4 developers with skills who could work on a bitcoin related project, where would they go?

Has anyone had good/bad experiences in this or other forums?

I've been working on a github "map" of the top bitcoin developers by code output, as well as looking at various forums. One small difficulty is figuring out that the same people may have many different pseudonyms on different boards, so it is hard to know how big the community of devs is...

Thoughts or comments?

Went to a cafe in Palo Alto California and by coincidence, they accepted BTC

YAY!