Walkthrough for installing a cold-storage Armory setup from scratch

[Falkvinge]

I spent the day writing a walkthrough for installing Armory for cold-storage use on a laptop that isn't connected to the Internet (nor ever will be). As the default install of Ubuntu Linux (and probably Debian) doesn't include the necessary dependencies for Armory, a couple of hacks are needed to get everything properly in place.

Includes tutorials on backup and security procedures.

Hope you find it useful:

Placing your bitcoin in cold storage: Installing Armory on Ubuntu

If this finds its way to some official guide, the one thing that may need additional massaging is how to use apt-offline on a main workstation that is based on Microsoft Windows or Mac OS X (the walkthrough assumes Ubuntu Linux).

Cheers,
Rick

[Danglebee]

i wanting delete bitcoin-qt and replace for armory. easy with guide!
i try in weekend and give result.
thanks

[Falkvinge]

You don't need to delete bitcoin-qt. Armory runs bitcoind (part of the reference client) as its network backend, so Armory would just reinstall it. However, Armory provides a much richer set of wallet features on top of the reference network libraries.

[CipherAnthem]

Hi Rick, read about your problems with MtGox. Glad to see high-profile users such as yourself moving to more secure solutions for storing your coins. Hopefully you didn't have too many coins at gox.

Thought I would mention: in case you don't have an old computer and still want to run a cold wallet, a cheap solution would be to get yourself a raspberry pi and follow my guide at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=443173.0

[Falkvinge]

Hi Rick, read about your problems with MtGox. Glad to see high-profile users such as yourself moving to more secure solutions for storing your coins. Hopefully you didn't have too many coins at gox.

Thanks!

I had a significant amount on Gox for my pathetic attempts at trading, to be ready whenever there was movement, so I could lose more money not making a profit off of trading. I've gotten most of the coins out, but a significant amount is still stuck, as I described in that post. Happy to hear you read it!

Also, I consider myself fairly technically literate. Any walkthrough of what's considered "best practice" that contains the words "open the laptop and resolder..." shows that bitcoin has quite a bit of usability hurdles yet to solve before its mainstream breakthrough.

Thought I would mention: in case you don't have an old computer and still want to run a cold wallet, a cheap solution would be to get yourself a raspberry pi and follow my guide at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=443173.0

Thanks for including the link in the thread! In order to get to usability, I believe us who are early adopters must first get familiar with the best practice of cold storage, and probably frustrated over it, so we can start eliminating the pain points one by one for the general public.

Cheers,
Rick

[benjyz]

thanks for the writeup. I think in the longterm a solution would be a pre-build Raspberry Pi with a printer / opensource hardware wallet. The Trezor looks good, but I would very much prefer an open hardware project. Which reminds me of the fact that even CPU functions can be compromised. See this article about use of hardware randomness in FreeBSD 10: http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/12/we-cannot-trust-intel-and-vias-chip-based-crypto-freebsd-developers-say/