Wallet for every coin?

BEGINNERS & HELP
#1

There are a lot of options to store your coins.

  1. Paper Wallet
  2. Hardware Wallet
  3. Software Wallet
  4. Online Wallet (If it is called like this)

Ivan did a video explanation on this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tg2wXAflF-g

I dont want to use a software wallet on my local machine. So I decided to use a life system on a USB stick. Therefore I took Tails. As it has electrum pre Installed. Additionally I installed Jaxx. Unfortunately the System is very “forgetful” and I have to copy and save the .config file of Jaxx every time I restart the System (it dosent work with the dotfiles folder because of the lack of permission after restarting the System). Furthermore both, electrum and Jaxx, give me more than one private Key and I don`t know why (Electrum gives me a whole list of matching private and public keys and Jaxx gives me two for bitcoin and also two for litecoin). In the end I am not really satisfied with the result.

I wouldn’t have a problem to purchase a hardware wallet like the ledger or trezor. Never the less, they support to few coins in my view. Because even if I have such a hardware wallet I am not able to store my IOTA in it (as far as I am concerned). My aim is to store all my coins at a local and save point.

My question is:
Is there any other save solution except a hardware wallet?

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#2

I believe paper and hardware are the safest. If you just want to store IOTA and don’t need to perform frequent transactions, you still can choose paper.

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#3

I have ordered the ledger nano S. As I understand it covers all my crypto except IOTA. If I am to make a paper wallet for IOTA, keep this wallet in my house, then let’s day my house burns down, is all lost? Or does it have a seed that you can recover from like the software wallet does? There are still security issues around storing this seed as ideally you would not want it in your house again in case it burns down, so where is safe?

Additionally I can’t remember if it was one of Ivan’s videos or a John McAfee speach that said this, but printers are really easy to hack. So in theory the act of printing out the paper wallet could be and easy target for hackers to steal a copy of the printed wallet.

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#4

Actually I thought about the case of burning the house or robbery. For this case, I would invent some simple obfuscation script (probably very simple, so I could keep it in memory and restore it manually with no computer), then I can obfuscate my wallet file and print the result (or write it myself on a paper). Now I’m free to keep this paper at home, even put it on a wall if i like, take a photo and upload it to the cloud, backup it in different way. Anyone who wants to steal my money will need to know how to restore ofuscated sequence. One obvious thing: don’t tell anyone, that you ever invented and used this thing for keeping your millions:))

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#5

Thanks Vic, I like the sound of this, is an obfuscation script essentially just encryption? You can obfuscate (encrypt) your recovery phrase. Store this obfuscation on cloudback up, then you simply need to be able to memories the obfuscation script. Is my understanding correct? If the obfuscation script was simple enough to memories would it be weak to a brut force cracking attempt on the obfuscated script that was stored online?

#6

no obfuscation is not encryption. Basically the idea is to hide your wallet data in some form that noone will ever understand that you store a wallet in this form. A simple example to grasp the idea: you split your wallet file in fragments of 5 symbols and insert them into some kind of coding related text at certain distances. you get a text fragment that is not recognised by anyone as a wallet file. If you never told anyone you use this kind of storing your funds, noone will ever think of torturing you to get the secret of this broken text, they will just skip it, throw it away

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#7

@Vic, Thanks Vic this sound like the solution I need.

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#9

I’m trying to repost my comment here instead of at the end of the discussion.

Here it is. The robot is trying to prevent the post because it is too similar to the first post.

Sorry for the extra text.

When you get your Leger it will read out 24 words on its tiny screen. This 24 word string will be your recovery phrase. You write this down on a card supplied with your Ledger. You then save this card. You could save it in a bank vault, if you are worried about your house burning down. Or you could store a copy of the card at a friend’s place. Or you could try obscuring the code as described above.

If you lose your Ledger or if it breaks, you then buy another Ledger and type in the recovery code to restore your private keys.

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#10

ah yes true, you can do the same for your recovery words.
But in case you want to store something that is not yet supported by hardware wallet, you are left with storing a wallet file only

#11

No problem David :slight_smile: don’t forget to test restoration process after you invent your obfuscation scheme

#12

Thanks guys, yes triple test lol, can you imagine the feeling if it did not work. :sob::joy:

Is there any way to obfuscate the 24 word recovery string without the use of a computer? When I write down my words from the ledger screen onto paper, to then type them back into a computer even to be obfuscated still leaves a very brief but exploitable security opening through key logging and or screen capture. There must be some old school pre-computer way to easily mash up these words in a way that a computer could not crack it, if the mash up was stolen?

#13

David, how about this idea. You open up your word processor and make up a fake letter, or story. Maybe the first word of the first sentence is your the first word of your 24 word recovery phrase. Then save this document and start another new document and this time make the 5th word in the first sentence the second of your 24 words. Keep doing this until you have 24 documents with the 24 secret words spread out among the paragraphs of words in a logical order that only you know. No one is going to figure out which words are your secret words.

Maybe just write a fake story that contains your 24 secret words interspersed though out the body of text in a logical sequence that you keep in your head.

You are writing your words to your computer one by one and if the words fit into the meaning of your story anyone eaves dropping will never know which words are your secret words.

I think this would obscure your words and allow you to keep a record of them on a computer. Make sure to have backup copies of the word document at several physical locations and in the cloud.

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#14

@JDC excellent suggestion. I think a is fair to say 1 word in per page of 24 pages would create millions/billions of possible recovery phrase combinations that is practiacally impossible for a computer to crack.

Do any coders know the maths on this? Possible combinations and real time time to crack? If there are 500 words per page would the maths be 500 to the power of 24?

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#15

I don’t know the formula for figuring out the probability of getting the right order of words either. I would like to know this also.

Here are some more points:

You have many files that can contain text on your hard drive. I probably have over a thousand. A hacker would not know which file(s) contained your secret code. The hack would have to examine all your computer files that contain text and randomly put together 24 word phrases.

Then the hacker would have to enter each 24 word list guess into a Ledger. This is not very easy to do and takes some time.

I don’t have my Ledger yet, but it might block you out after a few incorrect recovery attempts. If true, then I think an obscuring scheme as I suggest, even if in only one file of say 500 words, would be pretty strong.

What do you guys think?

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#16

to me, I would really keep the obfuscation dead simple and just make it look like a garbage random sheet of paper. So I would be sure I won’t make mistakes when recovering the original sequence and the printed sheet won’t attract anyone’s attention