Anyone familiar with bitcoin probably knows well enough its current biggest problems. One of which is bitcoin wallet security. You can take all sorts of security measures, whether its anti-virus software, offline linux based devices, paper and other non-digital versions of wallets. But there is always a chance that someone could eventually steal it, no matter how hard you hide it.
Is there anything we could do to prevent that from happening? I say yes there is. And here's what I think: Since whatever happens to your wallet, if it gets stolen eventually someone would try to send the money off of it, so your bitcoins are limited to bitcoin blockchain anyways. And here comes the catch. You could limit access to your bitcoins not only by securing the wallet file/private key in space continuum, but also in time. No, I'm not suggesting time travel, but something close enough. Imagine you can stall or set an exact time it takes to withdraw bitcoins from your wallet, right when you set it up the first time. Just enough time for you to cancel the transaction which is about to take place, in case your wallet has been compromised, and even send all your coins to another wallet without using a compromised password. You could argue that such system could be cracked offline, or the burglar could imitate emergency reallocation of funds. But we already know that the most secure system available to us is blockchain. Since bitcoins are to precious to be used to secure other bitcoins, alternative crypto-currency could be used for that purpose - namecoins. It could be anything else, but namecoins receive the benefits of bitcoin security, since they can be merge mined (that is mined at the same time with bitcoins without additional effort and have same level of network security). Namecoin wallet could be merged with bitcoin wallet to provide the latter with security in such a way, that any bitcoin transaction will result in a number of namecoin transactions first, one every few minutes (or hours), using insignificant amount of namecoins. For example, if you set your wallet to send the actual bitcoins only after 2 hours after the request, it would send namecoins 6 times every 20 minutes first, to a predefined namecoin address. The amount of namecoins sent in those transactions could be a pseudo random generated number so the bitcoin wallet can identify it with a particular bitcoin transaction about to commence (kind of an OTP pass generated by namecoind for the bitcoind). EDIT: this is to avoid faking the time change, if the wallet went offline for some time after the transaction initiation. Timestamped transactions in namecoin blockchain should avoid that issue.
If someone stole your wallet and trying to get bitcoins off your wallet, then you'd have 2 hours to cancel that transaction by sending namecoins (from any wallet) to a predefined address. You could even have a list of "options". Lets say, you have a number of wallets stored in different places in various forms and you know that some of them are still safe. You send a specific amount of namecoins to a predefined namecoin address (For example 0.2384 nmc, amount is used like a PIN number) and as soon as your stolen wallet identifies that transaction as confirmed it sends bitcoins straight away to your safe wallet. You could have a few wallets set up like that. I believe it would be wise to make those predefined namecoin addresses unchangeable and encrypted very hard, without possibility to recover the pass used.
This concept might have a flaw and of course not perfect. You could have all your alternative wallets compromised too and no way to recover your btc, but at least it gives you time to act upon the theft, BEFORE it actually happens. I'm not a security expert or an IT developer, but this idea came across my mind and I'm sharing it with you guys, in hopes that it might be useful. I don't know if its possible to implement it in the actual software (but it should be). I think when it comes to big money, the wallet should have at least something like this, I'd set it up for 24 hours at least for the transaction to go through. And have a normal wallet for day to day purchases =)
If you like the idea, please upvote it on reddit =): http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1d8cj6/bitcoin_wallet_hard_to_steal_sand_watches_concept/
Topic: Bitcoin wallet. Hard to steal "sand watches" concept. (Read 870 times)
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