Topic: Has anyone successfully used raspberry pi + Electrum as cold wallet? (Read 5643 times)

Noting comments above that electrum might work on a lot of linux, I add the following comments:

On Ubuntu 12.04 LTS and xubuntu 12.04 LTS, electrum might be available available but only with fiddly dependencies. - it prefers newer linux.
On Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and 15.05 and xubuntu 14.04 LTS and xubuntu 15.04, electrum is available and is listed in Ubuntu Software Centre as one of those things which you can just download and install

I had a go at getting Electrum to work on an ordinary raspberry pi, in which the 8GB sd card is definitely too small to try setting up a full blockchain record
[ 34GB at the time of writing ].
I spent a while downloading libs and dependencies to a raspberry pi "B+" 512MB single core from 2013 on its default raspbian operating system.
Electrum then installed unproblematically.

Boot the pi while plugged in to your internet connection.
after startx to have the big white desktop with a picture of a raspberry on it, open a terminal and enter "electrum"
The first time it was used, when offered a choice to "create a new wallet or open an old one", I decided to open the old one which I'd put a bitcoin on last year from ubuntu12.04 electrum.  It asked for the passphrase, to which you type some bad poetry of a dozen or so random dictionary words which I'd remembered from the other computer.

It had a think about it for about two minutes, displaying "synchronising", and then it found multiple bitcoin addresses from my wallet of last year and the bitcoin which I'd put on them.  This shows that electrum really had sent my bitcoin "to the cloud" because I've just recovered it from only the bad poetry of last year. The old electrum wallet put the bitcoin on the blockchain, and that old computer has not even been switched on this month.

The next day I saw a transaction from a bitcoin mining pool to one of my wallet destination addresses go through and be spendable from the raspberry Pi.

So, a raspberry pi B+ single-core 512MB ram running raspbian is demonstrated to be capable of running electrum.
AND electrum is shown to be using decentralised blockchain methods from which you can recover your bitcoin using only your passphrase.
The nearest thing to a cold wallet in this case was my exceptional memory for bad poetry.  Keep your passphrase safe everyone !

You're correct - I accidently missed the wget of the offline bundle.  I made a few changes to the script as Armory released version 0.93 but initially there was no offline bundle available.

The offline bundle's installer script will create the Armory icons for you.

On the Armory sub forum there has been a minor release 0.93.70 which I have not tried yet.

I've used armory and bitcoin core on my desktop (windows), but after running the script, there is not desktop shortcut for Armory on my pi. Do I have to run it from the command line? Google wasn't very helpful. I'm new to linux (this is actually my first project with a raspberry pi and first time using linux). What is the file I need to execute to run armory and generate a key? when I cd into my armory dir, and ls, there is nothing there... When I ls --all, I get " . " (root I think?) and " .. " (parent I think?) All files and libraries installed correctly (the only error message I got was for the camera files, which I don't plan on using).
Apparently I missed a few error messages. Armory did not install correctly. Can you tell me why lines 115-118 are commented out (outdated Armory builds?)? I get an error on line 119 no such file or directory (I'm guessing because there is no wget...). I put wget back in on line 119. Maybe I should be looking at github for more info?
Thanks for bearing with me. :-)

Hi. I'll have to see exactly what rubbish I write in the Readme, but my intention was to say - never again to connect to the internet.

Whilst it would technically be possible to say burn to SD the latest Raspbian ISO then apt-get update && apt-get upgrade (and log all the updated libraries, download them and refashioned the SD Card ) It would be a pain in the bottom.

Private keys/seeds should ideally be generated on an offline airgapped machine that will never leak the private key/seed to the internet. So apart from the recent media news about back doored hard drive NSA firmware - updating, installing, pulling the Ethernet cable,  and then generating private keys offline should be 100% safe.

If the NSA wanted to get you then there is nothing you can do to protect yourself.

AussieHash, I'm following your github readme, and I have a few questions... I want to do a completely secure, air-gapped, "NEVER been connected to a network" raspberry pi build. Is there a way to complete the build on a regular computer, and then just put the SD card in the raspberry pi, sort of "plug and play"? Or does the raspberry pi HAVE to go online to get the necessary updates? Would I need raspbian installed on my other computer?

A Pi works extremely well with electrum/offline armory/coinkite multisig/Trezor and btchip/ledger nano.  I also have the Pi Camera working to read QR codes

You definately want the 512Mb B or B+ as compiling cython via pip needs all the RAM

https://github.com/aussiehash/Bitcoin-for-SBC

Electrum will work on practically any linux distro. You don't even need a GUI.

I'm new to bitcoin, but based on two days of intense learning, it seems like this is an excellent and cheap method of cold storage.

If anyone else here has done this, what OS and model of raspberry pi would you recommend?