Generate private keys in Bitcoin safely and cheaply

I had started writing this post when diving online I have come across several pages of bitcoiners who had already written about the generation of keys using Ian Coleman’s BIP39 tool plus the Tails system, so I will limit myself to putting the links already specify the steps roughly.

Resources

Operational

  1. Download Tails, verify the signature and copy it to a USB. We downloaded version 4.7
wget https://mirrors.ukfast.co.uk/sites/tails.boum.org/tails/stable/tails-amd64-4.7/tails-amd64-4.7.img

Check the image

https://tails.boum.org/install/linux/usb-download/index.en.html#command-line

Copy the image

dd if=tails-amd64-4.7.img of=/dev/sda bs=16M oflag=direct status=progress
  1. Start the computer from the Tails USB and configure Internet access.
  2. Download the bip39-standalone.html file from https://github.com/iancoleman/bip39/releases

For version 0.4.3 the command would be this:

wget https://github.com/iancoleman/bip39/releases/download/0.4.3/bip39-standalone.html -O /home/amnesia/Tor\ Browser\bip39-standalone.html
  1. Remove the Internet connection from Tails.
  2. Run bip39-standalone.html from Tor-browser. 
tor-browser /home/amnesia/Tor\ Browser\bip39-standalone.html
  1. On the page loaded in the browser generate the 24 words. Entropy can be added for greater security.
  2. Generate the passphrase with 6 random words from the Long Diceware Wordlist 

Save in a safe place

  • The list of the 24 words of the seed → My recommendation is to do it on one or more metal plates. References Metal Bitcoin Seed Storage Reviews could also be worth a simple stainless steel sheet .
  • The 6 words of the passphrase → Store them on one or more metal plates, different from the previous ones. We want to store the seed and the passphrase in different places.
  • Derived Addresses → These are our public addresses where we will have to enter the funds.
  • BIP32 Derivation Path → This value may be useful in the future when wanting to retrieve private keys in a wallet.
  • Account Extended Public Key → Key from which we can extract all our public keys.
  • BIP32 Extended Public Key (XPUB) → Key in BIP32 format to extract all our public keys.


Categories: Bitcoin, Security, Wallet

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