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

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

2. Start the computer from the Tails USB and configure Internet access.
3. 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

4. Remove the Internet connection from Tails.
5. Run bip39-standalone.html from Tor-browser. 

tor-browser /home/amnesia/Tor\ Browser\bip39-standalone.html

6. On the page loaded in the browser generate the 24 words. Entropy can be added for greater security.
7. 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

Tags: cheap, Private keys