Faraday Cage / Cold Storage

[the founder]

To answer your question,  we employ Multiple backups  -- storage in a bank safe,  storage in a faraday safe cage,  and storage on another "classified" method..  LOL!! classified meaning I really don't want to spell out all our backup solutions due to security. 

Cold storage has a more robust backup solution than normal banking,  but the reason for that is simple usefulness,  when a coin is sent to cold storage,  it's literally sent to a machine that is off,  hence it's unuseable until it's recalled back (which takes about 72 hours to manually go to the bank, pick up the drive,  download the blockchain,  then forward it to the proper user) ...  so it's not helpful for immediate usage, but WAY helpful as a secure savings account.

[1714044594]

1714044594

[deepceleron]

Laser engrave private keys on a tungsten bucking bar. The bank can burn down around it and it will still be readable.

[ne1]

Are there any good tutorials for printing private keys importable to mtgox from a wallet.dat that anyone could recommend.  Preferably for linux?

-N

[casascius]

I think it would be a trivial utility to make...

[ne1]

I think it would be a trivial utility to make...

I hear you.  What I mean is, do you know of a good step by step tutorial for generating public and priv addresses?  I took a look at your utility on github and didn't see much documentation.  It may be there and I may just have to spend some time figuring it out.  Casascius, you are very experienced with printing keys and I've seen your thread on generating keys from a passphrase.  I'm just looking for a little help in this area and maybe a good tutorial.  I've been meaning to generate and print some keys for a while so I can have my friend engrave them into steel plates.  I suppose I could just get some casascius coins and load them up and have my friend engrave the priv key.  Duh.

-N

[deepceleron]

vanitygen will do that, just give it a simple phrase and it will spit out several addresses and keys a second, and it has been used a lot without making a bad key.

At present, vanitygen can be built on Linux, and requires the openssl and pcre libraries.

This will print random addresses and keys faster than you can load paper:

./vanitygen -q -k 1 > /dev/lp0

[Valalvax]

Just get a computer from NASA, they can withstand going into orbit with no problems at all

[ne1]

I don't know dude, I can load paper pretty fast , jk thanks.

[casascius]

I think it would be a trivial utility to make...

I hear you.  What I mean is, do you know of a good step by step tutorial for generating public and priv addresses?  I took a look at your utility on github and didn't see much documentation.  It may be there and I may just have to spend some time figuring it out.  Casascius, you are very experienced with printing keys and I've seen your thread on generating keys from a passphrase.  I'm just looking for a little help in this area and maybe a good tutorial.  I've been meaning to generate and print some keys for a while so I can have my friend engrave them into steel plates.  I suppose I could just get some casascius coins and load them up and have my friend engrave the priv key.  Duh.

-N

If you want to just generate some brand new keys, go to Bitaddress.org and hit "Generate"... simple.  A neato utility created by user pointbiz, that I had a lot of input on during its creation.

It will not create from a passphrase, but he says he's working on that.  I am dangling a 10BTC 1oz silver coin in front of him as bounty if he adds a few features to that (the ability to create two-part paper wallets would be nice as well).

[film2240]

Thing I want to know is how do I build a farraday cage with materials I can easily find? Where in the UK can I find these materials without too much trouble? How's the bitcoin network coping with the increased solar activity recently (solar flare)? I'm not sure what will happen in UK apart from the Northern lights in London (as it's normally in scotland,Northern England and near the Arctic).

I wish to protect my 2 computers,phone,DAB alarm clock,e.t.c (too many to list here) from solar flares.What are the chances that all my gear will be fried and worthless?

[deepceleron]

Thing I want to know is how do I build a farraday cage with materials I can easily find? Where in the UK can I find these materials without too much trouble? How's the bitcoin network coping with the increased solar activity recently (solar flare)? I'm not sure what will happen in UK apart from the Northern lights in London (as it's normally in scotland,Northern England and near the Arctic).

I wish to protect my 2 computers,phone,DAB alarm clock,e.t.c (too many to list here) from solar flares.What are the chances that all my gear will be fried and worthless?

A Faraday cage is not what you are looking for, you want power surge suppressors and line conditioners. Solar flares affect 100km power lines, which act like big antennas. They don't affect your personal electronics to any notable degree (unless you are in space).

[westkybitcoins]

Thing I want to know is how do I build a farraday cage with materials I can easily find? Where in the UK can I find these materials without too much trouble? How's the bitcoin network coping with the increased solar activity recently (solar flare)? I'm not sure what will happen in UK apart from the Northern lights in London (as it's normally in scotland,Northern England and near the Arctic).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage

I would think that the wire mesh used on screen doors would do fine. Seems like overkill, but whatever you feel you need.

Personally, I'm not worried about the solar activity. I have my computers plugged into surge protectors, and have backups of my wallets on paper and/or CD as well as electronic media. If the problems from the flares get too severe, I don't think spending bitcoins would be on my "must get to" list anytime soon.

[film2240]

Thing I want to know is how do I build a farraday cage with materials I can easily find? Where in the UK can I find these materials without too much trouble? How's the bitcoin network coping with the increased solar activity recently (solar flare)? I'm not sure what will happen in UK apart from the Northern lights in London (as it's normally in scotland,Northern England and near the Arctic).

I wish to protect my 2 computers,phone,DAB alarm clock,e.t.c (too many to list here) from solar flares.What are the chances that all my gear will be fried and worthless?

A Faraday cage is not what you are looking for, you want power surge suppressors and line conditioners. Solar flares affect 100km power lines, which act like big antennas. They don't affect your personal electronics to any notable degree (unless you are in space).

That's wierd,I was told that solar flares fry all electronics (like the predicted superstorm would in 2012 later this year) and that surge protectors were useless and that only farraday cages were effective.How is a power surge supressor/line conditioner different from a regular surge protector? Also what do line conditioners do?

Everything I own uses very sensitive electronics (even my 'simple' LED torch has them,unfortunately.Tip is,get a bulb torch instead as they are more 'hardy').List of things I have that have very sensitive electronics (this may be a long list so I won't be mentioning too much here:
1.Mi-fi (Wi-fi 3G mobile broadband pocket router)
2.2x mobile phones (1 is a spare when the battery dies in my main phone)
3.LED torch
4.2 computers (1 PC,1 MBP)
5.All chargers
6.Bluetooth headset
and too many other thing to list here.Can Solar flares affect battery operated electronics? If not,then 1/3 of my things will be safe (except my MBP probably).

Any advice/tips would be appreciated.Also I'd like to invite someone to write about solar flare preparedness on my blog as many other sites promise to give tips but then don't or give wrong info.I'd like to invite an expert on the topic to write a post about it for me on my blog,thanks.If interested please PM me,thanks.

[bitterness]

My question is due to us getting bombarded every 2 days now with CME's coming from the sun,  the next one scheduled to hit earth tomorrow is that something I could be using for promotional stuff?   

You would just make a fool of yourself. Most computer cases are actual faraday cages, if properly grounded (and within there are plenty more, hdds for instance). Not to protect against external radiation but to shield you against EM emission from within the case.

Now "cosmic bombardment". Those very fast protons hit our atmosphere (causing nice looking aurorae) and decay mostly to muons at ground level. Bad news, there is no reasonable way to avoid them. Even if you put your safe deep beyond a mountain, they will get ya.

[casascius]

It would be trivial to make a utility that takes a wallet.dat and spits out all the private keys in printable form, directly to the printer perhaps.  In a roundabout way, I have already made one, that I use when I recover people's corrupted wallets.

This simple utility looks for the byte sequence "04 20" inside wallet.dat, and treats the next 32 bytes as a Bitcoin private key.  While this will sometimes catch byte sequences that aren't really private keys, the side effects are minimal - just an extra bloat of a few phantom private keys that have no value.  The amount of C code needed to do this would literally fit on one average sized screen.  The only caveat is that the wallet must not be encrypted.

Those 32 key bytes can be printed out verbatim (hexadecimal), or converted into Sipa wallet import format along with a QR code for easy printing and import.  The average wallet will have lots of them, and also there will be duplicates that should be removed if they are extracted using this method.  But otherwise it would definitely work.

[deepceleron]

That's wierd,I was told that solar flares fry all electronics (like the predicted superstorm would in 2012 later this year) and that surge protectors were useless and that only farraday cages were effective.How is a power surge supressor/line conditioner different from a regular surge protector? Also what do line conditioners do?

The coronal mass ejection started interacting with Earth's magnetic field 12 hours ago, mass mayhem has not ensued. There is no predicted "superstorm", the sun goes through a normal 11-year cycle of activity.

Changing magnetic fields and moving charged particles can induce currents; however, solar storms are global-scale events, and the primary concern is the electrical grid. DC currents can be excited in power lines that normally carry AC-only, causing problems with transformers and substations. Your individual worries would be power bumps if substations automatically switch off or reroute the power grid, causing unclean power pulses or brownouts to your devices. A power conditioner is a high-end device that keeps a constant 240v to your devices - it is like a 240vac power supply that runs off the line current (most cheap battery backups don't do this - they only switch in during an outage or significant voltage drop). A surge suppressor keeps damaging voltage spikes from your devices. These happen primary from lightning strikes, but may happen from power grid malfunction, such as power lines sagging from the heat of carrying extra current and shorting on trees.

[BurtW]

It would be trivial to make a utility that takes a wallet.dat and spits out all the private keys in printable form, directly to the printer perhaps.  In a roundabout way, I have already made one, that I use when I recover people's corrupted wallets.

This simple utility looks for the byte sequence "04 20" inside wallet.dat, and treats the next 32 bytes as a Bitcoin private key.  While this will sometimes catch byte sequences that aren't really private keys, the side effects are minimal - just an extra bloat of a few phantom private keys that have no value.  The amount of C code needed to do this would literally fit on one average sized screen.  The only caveat is that the wallet must not be encrypted.

Those 32 key bytes can be printed out verbatim (hexadecimal), or converted into Sipa wallet import format along with a QR code for easy printing and import.  The average wallet will have lots of them, and also there will be duplicates that should be removed if they are extracted using this method.  But otherwise it would definitely work.

pywallet does exactly this ^ does it not?  You can browse your wallet import/export private keys etc.

[kjj]

My question is due to us getting bombarded every 2 days now with CME's coming from the sun,  the next one scheduled to hit earth tomorrow is that something I could be using for promotional stuff?   

You would just make a fool of yourself. Most computer cases are actual faraday cages, if properly grounded (and within there are plenty more, hdds for instance). Not to protect against external radiation but to shield you nearby licensed radio operations against EM emission from within the case.

Now "cosmic bombardment". Those very fast protons hit our atmosphere (causing nice looking aurorae) and decay mostly to muons at ground level. Bad news, there is no reasonable way to avoid them. Even if you put your safe deep beyond a mountain, they will get ya.

Fixed that for ya.  Not even the crazies think that RFI from a computer is harmful to humans any more, but the FCC takes a dim view of anything that interferes with licensed radio systems.  They'd fine the sun for harmful interference if they could.

And my understanding was that muons were just a tiny bit harder to stop than beta rays, since they have the same electrical interactions, just a (lot) more mass.  The real problem is X-rays (or gamma rays, or cosmic rays, depending on which decade your physics textbook was written in), since they can penetrate and ionize.

But that is mostly a problem for solid state storage, which brings us back to deepceleron's point, that the real protection needed is on the power line.

Hmm.  I wonder if my coil winder is big enough to make a ferroresonant transformer big enough for the whole house.

[runeks]

A paper wallet is a million times easier.  They work really well.

but so fragile at the same time  

Make a photocopy and keep it in two places.

Create it from passphrase and then it's also in your head.

or maybe laminate some sheets too. Talking about deterministic wallets, where i can find a tool for that ?

Check out Armory. It has that, plus a buttload of other cool features.

Like a "watch only wallet" that has only the public keys in it. So you can keep track of the transactions that go to the wallet, but the private key is on another (offline) computer, or possibly just printed out on a piece of paper. It also supports offline transactions. Still in alpha though.

[the founder]

I don't think you guys fully comprehend what a solar storm can do:

It was frying UNPLUGGED simple telegraph systems in 1859, what do you think it would do to a modern computer, ipad or iphone?   It would fuse their circuits.

Telegraph systems all over Europe and North America failed, in some cases even shocking telegraph operators.[6] Telegraph pylons threw sparks and telegraph paper spontaneously caught fire.[7] Some telegraph systems appeared to continue to send and receive messages despite having been disconnected from their power supplies.[8]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_storm_of_1859

The advice given about just putting a surge protector would be fine for the storm that hit yesterday and today...  maybe an X1 flair (the next one up)  but anything bigger than that and your in for an ugly surprise if that is all you did.   I love what it does to paper if it's near a machine... like freaking kindling.