Need help on transferring money from cold wallet

[Sword Smith]

Hi forum

I hope you can help me on this:

I have some bitcoins stored on a cold wallet made on a computer which has never touched the internet. The wallet was made on an old Eee PC from 2008, it has 1GB RAM and some slow processor. On this computer I do not use the harddisk since I boot directly from a Ubuntu 10.04 LTS USB pen drive (3.1GB free disk space but I do have larger USB keys available if needed) and no information leaves or enters this computer through USB drives or in any other ways.

I would now like to transfer funds from this cold wallet and distribute it to some other wallets, some belonging to others and one belonging to me and I am conflicted with how to transfer these money. I have a faster computer that I use for my daily use and it can thus not be considered safe. I could boot this "hot" (possibly tainted) computer from an Ubuntu 10.04 USB pen drive (16 GB, not the same drive as the EeePC's) and install the original Bitcoin client (qt) on this, let the computer download the entire blockchain, import the private key and make a transfer from this computer once the blockchain is downloaded and the private key imported. I could also just trust Mt. Gox or some other online wallet and swipe my private address there and then transfer the money from this but this does not seem like a very safe method. I also know that a client called Armory exists but I have never used this and I don't know how this would work and on which computer I should install it (the fast computer or my Eee PC?)

I would love some help on this issue, very useful and detailed explanations will be tipped at my discretion. I am fairly knowledgeable about the bitcoin system and I understand the concept of the blockchain, private key, public keys, ECDSA, SHA256 and addresses. I also have two-step verification on my Mt. Gox account but I am one of the 15,000+ in queue for verification there.

[1714820633]

1714820633

[jackjack]

New version of pywallet is coming in around 6 hours and will include easy transaction creation
That option will be specifically developped for that use

[Sword Smith]

New version of pywallet is coming in around 6 hours and will include easy transaction creation
That option will be specifically developped for that use

So this will run on an old netbook and I will not have to download the entire blockchain to make a transaction? On whihc of my computers would you recommend that I install pywallet?

[jackjack]

Yes
Both :
- your hot one will display the transactions you can spend
- you'll have to choose which ones you want to use and the outputs
- it will return a string you'll give to the pywallet on your cold computer (by hand or qr reader)
- the latter will display the inputs/outputs and ask you if you're sure to sign that transaction
- it will then give you the raw transaction you can broadcast through bitcoind, pywallet or blockchain.info/pushtx

[Sword Smith]

Yes
Both :
- your hot one will display the transactions you can spend
- you'll have to choose which ones you want to use and the outputs
- it will return a string you'll give to the pywallet on your cold computer (by hand or qr reader)
- the latter will display the inputs/outputs and ask you if you're sure to sign that transaction
- it will then give you the raw transaction you can broadcast through bitcoind, pywallet or blockchain.info/pushtx

So this works a bit like Armory? I like that. So the private key never touches the hot computer and I do not have to download the blockchain on the cold computer? Only the public key touches the hot computer, right?

[jackjack]

I never used Armory yet so I can't say
And yes for the three questions

[Sword Smith]

I never used Armory yet so I can't say
And yes for the three questions

Thanks. I am not relinquishing my intention of a tip. I could have used a bit more details though but I will read through the pywallet manual instead, try the system and return to this thread within a couple of days.

If anyone else has some information to offer, feel free to add it here!

Edit: Pywallet is up and running on my Windows 7 computer and it was a bit of a hassle to install with all the dependencies but it works fine now. I assume that the new version is still not up since Github tells me that the newest version is three days old and the option that I need does not seem to be there even though I can find the public key from a private key?

[Sword Smith]

So I ended up making this work for Armory which actually seems to be working fairly well. Thanks for the help, though.