What should you do if you don't have a ledger or trezor right now?

in #crypto7 years ago (edited)

  • create a USB bootable Linux tails os , you'll need two drives for the installation process, only one of them will be your bootable drive (other one has some intermediate installation data)

  • os is really secure, even basic commands like sudo, make, apt-get are disabled by default for security. Extremely difficult to install shit, and you wouldn't want to tweak settings to make installation possible as it's not recommended if security and privacy is your main goal

  • electrum Wallet is present by default, although you might need to update (run latest version from source)

  • keep the wallet in "persistent" folder if you want to save the files for next reboot , everything else outside this folder is stored in the ram, and gets erased after powering off

  • create wallet while offline , you can type the private key seed on a .txt, right click, encrypt it with a passphrase (uses pgp encryption) and send it to yourself

While some may argue saving your private key digitally is risky, and that paper is the way to go, but I don't see any way someone can steal your keys if you do it like this. You just have to trust that there are no hardware keyloggers on your machine, or a compromised firmware - both extremely unlikely

  • you can use my ether wallet offline and do the same for ETH

  • when you want to see the private key, you can either log in to a tails session, or even decrypt it on windows using CMD (this doesn't create any file with your private key, just displays it in the cmd ; making it pretty safe, although less safer than using tails to view the keys - you could still be screencapped or something by a good enough s/w keylogger)

use this command for decryption :

gpg --batch --passphrase-fd 0 --armor --decrypt filename.pgp

This setup is like building your own hardware wallet, almost as good as ledger or trezor. ALMOST . PS: I'm still getting a Ledger !

Sort:  

Congratulations @josephd! You received a personal award!

2 Years on Steemit

Click here to view your Board

Do not miss the last post from @steemitboard:

SteemWhales has officially moved to SteemitBoard Ranking
SteemitBoard - Witness Update

Support SteemitBoard's project! Vote for its witness and get one more award!

Congratulations @josephd! You received a personal award!

Happy Birthday! - You are on the Steem blockchain for 3 years!

You can view your badges on your Steem Board and compare to others on the Steem Ranking

Vote for @Steemitboard as a witness to get one more award and increased upvotes!