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Author Topic: Safest cold storage options currently  (Read 433 times)
PrimeNumber7
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August 15, 2019, 05:24:13 AM
 #21

The solution to a $5 wrench attack, and other similar attacks involving physical force to you as a person is to keep a small number of coin associated with a BIP 39 seed with the passphrase/last seed word being something different than the passphrase that secures the majority of your coin. This will allow you to give something to the attacker while both preserving a portion of your coin and maintaining your safety.

Well, but this is only possible if either 1) the person attacking you doesn't know the magnitude of BTC's you own or 2) you have an amount large enough accessible without the passphrase.

If an attacker knows (e.g. because you are telling everyone, or because you are some known person in the community) that you own about X - Y bitcoins, he won't be happy with seeing 1/10 X or even less of that in your non-password protected wallet.
I mean.. you might be able to deceive attacker which aren't familiar with BTC and wallets, but in any other case it will be pretty obvious that the full amount is protected with an additional password.

This might be useful for plausible deniability regarding a person which doesn't know how much you own, but it won't protect you if he knows how much approximately own.
It is a good security practice to not go around bragging how much coin you have. Even if you disregard this best practice, there is always a the chance you are embellishing how much coin you have, cannot remember how to access a portion of the coin for one of many reasons, including due to the stress related to the '$5 wrench' attack.

If an attacker believes you to have 5,000 btc, but is only able to obtain 5 or 10 btc from you, this is still a lot of money, although much less than the millions that would be had from stealing 5,000, and receiving 10 btc might be one reason to deescalate the situation in order to avoid very harsh punishment such as jail time for the attack.   


If someone is willing to torture you for your bitcoin, then it is pretty irrelevant if you have a hardware wallet, airgapped device, paper wallet, or whatever.
The solution to a $5 wrench attack, and other similar attacks involving physical force to you as a person is to keep a small number of coin associated with a BIP 39 seed with the passphrase/last seed word being something different than the passphrase that secures the majority of your coin. This will allow you to give something to the attacker while both preserving a portion of your coin and maintaining your safety.

To answer the OP's question, I would not over complicate my cold storage setup. I would choose a HW wallet manufacturer I am comfortable is making a product that cannot easily be compromised, keep my coin secured by that HW wallet, and use the paper card as a backup with the seed hand written on it stored in a safety deposit box.


The problem of this solution to $5 wrench attack is that it is public, any robber could have read and known that.

IMO, hardware wallet could act as baits. One can simply put two or three shares of coins in a hardware wallet both in dummy wallet and hidden vault(or even plus dummy hidden vault for third share) while put the majority of his coins the rest part elsewhere.
Major HW wallet implementations allow for users to use a passphraise as the last word in their seed, and can potentially have multiple passphraises that create multiple seeds.
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