.

[DATA COMMANDER]

This may be a stupid question, but if the wallet file just contains a private key, would it be possible to simply write the key down on a piece of paper and then take a magnet to your hard drive if you're paranoid about your security already being compromised? Obviously you'd need to be very sure not to lose that piece of paper, but this would give you time to set up a truly secure system.

[1714092972]

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[1714092972]

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[mintymark]

Vladimir said: Amnesia could be a very expensive illness in bitcoin land, take care. You've been warned!

This got me thinking. We all die and suffer accidents in ways that often stretch our imagination to envisage. It has always been thus. Today we still occasionally find roman coins hidden by people who through bad luck or bad planning or a bit of both were unable to retrieve their fortunes (See 1) the story of a find of a crock of roman gold coins that weighed 25 stone, or (2) the moving story of a family on the run from the Nazis who burried their fortune in a London house that was bombed and then found 50 years later.

The point is this can NEVER happen with bitcoin. In some ways its a good thing, undoubtedly this removes the incentive for someone to "arrange"an accident for me. But it also seems sad and in a way deficient that while a store of value manufactured in roman times, still serves as exactly that now, even though we do no know who it belonged to, and that a store of value from WW2 was returned successfully to the descendants of the person who hid it, this cannot happen with bitcoin. Could it be that after say 100 years a lost coin is returned to something like a mining pool?  Is there any other way to return or re-mint lost bitcoins?

1) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1292990/Chef-Dave-Crisp-discovers-largest-hoard-Roman-coins-Somerset-field.html
2) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-13128903

[ben-abuya]

Could it be that after say 100 years a lost coin is returned to something like a mining pool?  Is there any other way to return or re-mint lost bitcoins?

Yes, with the Dead Man's Switch You can program in several layers of transfer. After 30 days, the money could go to your close family. After a year, it could go to some website you sign up for that will specialize in determining your identity in more conventional ways and give the money back to you or your next of kin. Or you could make it go to some favorite charity. You could also have it go to a miner, but I'm not sure what the point is. I guess if a lot of people did this it would bring bitcoin transaction fees down.

One last thing to remember is that when the money finally disappears, it makes every other bitcoin user a bit richer, exactly the opposite of inflation. So in a sense, even then it's not completely lost to the world.

[zer0]

buy this for ~$70 depending on retailer
https://www.ironkey.com/basic

keep wallet.dat savings in a truecrypt container on it. ironkeys have a mouse keyboard you can use to defeat keyloggers to open your truecrypt file. brute force and even physical attack on ironkeys is pointless they self delete after 10 tries or from physical tampering

to remember a giant password that you don't want to have to write down for security risk, or you don't trust Bruce Schneier's twofish encrypyted Password Safe for whatever reasons then grab a dvd/book and use parts of it to make the password.

Example:

Grab your copy of Battletoads lying around and use the UPC and first sentence to make a pass: http://www.sega-mag.com/jeux/cover/Megadrive/Battletoads-Megadrive-EUR.jpg

alternate shift + caps

9&4#6%6!0^4&WtEdQkYbBaTbPa,ItTgRM,AtGe!
39 char pass you'll never forget as long as battletoads doesn't get thrown out

[ben-abuya]

buy this for ~$70 depending on retailer
https://www.ironkey.com/basic

The LiveCD laptop is still more secure against keylogging malware. I feel like entering your password on an everyday, internet connected machine is scary. It would be cool if you could plug a keyboard straight into the ironkey.

[lonestranger]

This is essentially how I use my normal wallet! With that said, I wonder how many people just getting into Bitcoin would be overwhelmed just by steps 1-4.

Exactly! What does THIS mean?
4  create a truecrypt disk with image stored on this USB drive so that all bitcoin files and datadir and
therefore wallet.dat are on this truecrypt disk and make a .bat or .sh file which starts bitcoin client from this USB drive.

I now see that the wallet is one of the weakest aspects of bitcoin so far. This is going to continue causing misery for so many!

[koin]

I hadn't understood where plausible deniability was important.  Then I read:
  TrueCrypt User Held in Contempt of Court
http://forums.truecrypt.org/viewtopic.php?t=23969
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2693599

[runeks]

I was about to fire up a live Ubuntu USB with Truecrypt as this guide suggest, when I realized that the new client (0.4) that I'm going to run on the USB Live disk, already has the ability to encrypt my wallet.
Is there any reason to encrypt the wallet using Truecrypt when the client itself supports it?

[fornit]

the wallet encryption only protects the private keys, so an attacker cannot spend your coins. he can, however, see the balance in your wallet and on each individual address. so if thats an issue for you, you might use truecrypt in addition to the wallet encryption. truecrypt cannot protect a wallet thats in use, so for a regularly running bitcoin client the clients wallet encryption is still the best solution.

[runeks]

I see. I think I'm going for Truecrypt, also because it's had some years for people to find holes in its encryption implementation, while the Bitcoin client's implementation is fairly new.

[Bitcoin Oz]

Bitcoin isnt worth anything now its been trademarked by a lawyer.

[runeks]

^ The market seems to disagree you with.

[Serge]

Bitcoin isnt worth anything now its been trademarked by a lawyer.

take your sites down before it's too late!!

[zer0]

Anybody trademark cryptocoin yet?

[dancupid]

Buy a cheap computer and never let it connect to the internet.
Download bitcoin on another computer and put it on a usb stick.
Install it on the new computer.
Create a wallet on it with 1,000,000 addresses (a big file harder to steal).
Encrypt it.
Copy the wallet back to the usb stick with at least one address for the wallet in a text file.
Trash the new computer (hammer nails through the hard drive and bury the hard drive).
Store the wallet in multiple locations.
Send all bitcoins you own to the address you saved.
Never access you savings wallet ever again.

[jixapori]

What about putting the wallet on a Truecrypt protected bootable USB stick that only has Bitcoin stuff on it and is only used for Bitcoin.  Then there would be no possibility of keyloggers or other background processes spying out your password.

I tried to set up a USB stick like this last year but was unsuccessful, but if somebody who knows what they are doing could do this and upload the image, it would surely make many people feel more secure.

[runeks]

^ That would work. But as soon as you connect to the internet, your bootable USB stick might be compromised.

[cypherdoc]

Buy a cheap computer and never let it connect to the internet.
Download bitcoin on another computer and put it on a usb stick.
Install it on the new computer.
Create a wallet on it with 1,000,000 addresses (a big file harder to steal).
Encrypt it.
Copy the wallet back to the usb stick with at least one address for the wallet in a text file.
Trash the new computer (hammer nails through the hard drive and bury the hard drive).
Store the wallet in multiple locations.
Send all bitcoins you own to the address you saved.
Never access you savings wallet ever again.

a better cheaper version of this is to download Ubuntu onto a Live CD.  start up your system off the CD and download Bitcoin and create a wallet.  note down one address and email it to yourself.

copy the wallet.dat over to a few Ironkeys and spread them around town.

shut down Live CD session and all data is wiped from RAM.

[ovidiusoft]

One could also use a USB stick with hardware write protection, boot a Linux distribution and use a Bitcoin client with deterministic wallets. On each boot, you recreate the wallet from the mnemonic code and nothing is ever written to the USB stick. Nothing to backup, nothing to steal for hackers. As long as the system is not hacked while running the Bitcoin client (you should keep it running just enough to do transactions, then shut down), it should be pretty safe.

For example: BitSafe-Electrum - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=54376.0

which is made of BitSafe - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46916.0
and Electrum - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=50936.0

[bg002h]

...or generate an address, write down the private key on paper...destroy the digital copy, put paper somewhere safe. Now your savings address is as safe as it can be from hackers.