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
- Ian Coleman’s BIP39 mnemonic codes tool → BIP39 web tool
- The portable operating system → Tails
- Arkad’s article in Spanish where he writes in detail how to do it → Definitive guide to create a wallet without the need for Hardware wallet and node
- How To Run Ian Coleman’s BIP39 Tool In A Secure Offline TAILS Temporary Live Boot Session
Operational
- 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
- Start the computer from the Tails USB and configure Internet access.
- 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
- Remove the Internet connection from Tails.
- Run bip39-standalone.html from Tor-browser.
tor-browser /home/amnesia/Tor\ Browser\bip39-standalone.html
- On the page loaded in the browser generate the 24 words. Entropy can be added for greater security.
- 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.
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