USB Selfbooting Solid State Wallets - Secure - Manufacturer Needed!

[cypherdoc]

This can be done now, you can boot off tinycore linux liveCD (12MB). For v0.8.0, install qt-4.x-base through "apps", wget http://iweb.dl.sourceforge.net/project/bitcoin/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.8.0/bitcoin-0.8.0-linux.tar.gz, and tar xvf bitcoin-0.8.0-linux.tar.gz.



It will explode after you use up it's 1GB RAMdisk downloading blockchain though, so you install it to a 32GB flash drive, and you can now boot a full OS with full GUI Bitcoin off removable disk. You can encrypt the home directory so Bitcoin data is unreadable without booting and entering a password.

I could easily make such a thing preloaded with blockchain for sale, the trick would be convincing others it is trustable and that future ones I sell would remain trustable.

ok, got everything installed just like you've described. 

but how do i run Bitcoin-qt?

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[deepceleron]

The official bitcoin-0.8.0-linux.tar.gz has a directory structure to the archive. From the directory where you extracted it, you can run Bitcoin by typing ./bitcoin-0.8.0-linux/bin/32/bitcoin-qt & in a terminal.

You can also move the above bitcoin-qt file to another directory by itself, no other files from the archive are needed to run Bitcoin. You can be really fancy and add an icon for it.

Make sure that you successfully created a persistent directory for your data, that you can shut down and reboot and your Bitcoin wallet addresses and the current block count are still there (just booting the live cd will always forget anything you downloaded as it only uses a RAM disk.) Also use UUID, so that partitions will always be found even if you use different USB ports or a different computer:

http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:persistent_home

now that MSFT appears to be preventing booting from USB sticks in Windows 8, will your TinyCore USB system still work on those machines?

Newer machines may use UEFI boot instead of BIOS, this requires a 64 bit distro and UEFI bootloader (Ubuntu 12.10 64 bit is one distro that is ready, tinycore liveCD is not). This is not "Microsoft preventing booting", it is pretty standard for it to be enabled on new PCs now that Win8 supports it; old BIOS doesn't support hard drives larger than 2 TB. Macs also use EFI. Only incompetent hardware manufacturers have a problem.

If "trusted boot" is enabled, a computer will only boot signed code. This is being worked on by kernel devs, but it requires kernel code signed by Microsoft. This is more of a grab by Microsoft that no user wants, under the guise of more security.

Both of these "features" can generally be disabled in BIOS. Windows 8 certified systems are required to permit the user to disable Secure Boot.

[whitenight639]

A similar alternative to this is to install an OS on a USB drive as a virtual machine, the disadvantage is any PC you connect it to has to have a the virtual machine software on it also.

I can't wait to see an open source hardware wallet based on the Arduino. 

[cypherdoc]

The official bitcoin-0.8.0-linux.tar.gz has a directory structure to the archive. From the directory where you extracted it, you can run Bitcoin by typing ./bitcoin-0.8.0-linux/bin/32/bitcoin-qt & in a terminal.

You can also move the above bitcoin-qt file to another directory by itself, no other files from the archive are needed to run Bitcoin. You can be really fancy and add an icon for it.

Make sure that you successfully created a persistent directory for your data, that you can shut down and reboot and your Bitcoin wallet addresses and the current block count are still there (just booting the live cd will always forget anything you downloaded as it only uses a RAM disk.) Also use UUID, so that partitions will always be found even if you use different USB ports or a different computer:

http://wiki.tinycorelinux.net/wiki:persistent_home

now that MSFT appears to be preventing booting from USB sticks in Windows 8, will your TinyCore USB system still work on those machines?

Newer machines may use UEFI boot instead of BIOS, this requires a 64 bit distro and UEFI bootloader (Ubuntu 12.10 64 bit is one distro that is ready, tinycore liveCD is not). This is not "Microsoft preventing booting", it is pretty standard for it to be enabled on new PCs now that Win8 supports it; old BIOS doesn't support hard drives larger than 2 TB. Macs also use EFI. Only incompetent hardware manufacturers have a problem.

If "trusted boot" is enabled, a computer will only boot signed code. This is being worked on by kernel devs, but it requires kernel code signed by Microsoft. This is more of a grab by Microsoft that no user wants, under the guise of more security.

Both of these "features" can generally be disabled in BIOS. Windows 8 certified systems are required to permit the user to disable Secure Boot.

now i'm having trouble booting to TC from USB despite checking boot loading order in bios.  have you ever seen this inconsistency?  this has been reported before.

which installer did you use?  CorePlus, unetbootin?  they recommend CorePlus but now my usb refuses to boot.  funny b/c the one time i got it to boot to TC was after i used unetbootin to install.  now that even won't work.