Steg wallets

[jim618]

The protobuf wallets now used in bitcoinj/multibit are quite small. A one key wallet with 30 transactions is only 25KB.

This makes it possible to steganographically hide a wallet in an image, audio file or video.
You could create a steg wallet by embedding a wallet into one of your holiday photos.

With a password to AES encrypt the data before you hide it, the data would just be visually imperceptible noise in the image.

A hackbot would then have to look through all your images/ audio/ video and look for the particular noise signature before extracting what it thinks is a wallet and then bruteforcing it. To make life more difficult for the attacker you can add random noise to all the rest of your images/ audio/ video with the same structure as the steganography encoding. Every media file you owned would then be potential wallet holder and the attacker would have no idea which was the real one.

[Mike Hearn]

Presumably you would only hide a deterministic root key (then it's already random). But this does sound a bit arcane for most users, even if it's a neat trick. If you're going to require a password anyway, may as well just make that strong.

Printing out the root key and then hiding it somewhere in your house seems like a better way to hide a wallet, if you want to do that. Put it under the floorboards

[jim618]

I was thinking of the whole wallet with the transactions and the labels for the receiving addresses and send addresses. They really are not that big for a 'savings wallet'.

When you opened a wallet, you would just choose the appropriate image file (ideally from a list of thumbnails) and your whole wallet would be there.

But yeah - you are right - probably a bit arcane for most users.

[Vitalik Buterin]

It's only arcane if there is no simple and integrated GUI (or even command line tool) for it.