Topic: Inquiry (Read 188 times)

The emphasis on the difficult of setting up an air-gapped cold wallet is very much over sounded such that it discourages. Setting it up is not as difficult as it is promoted, what is needed is attentiveness and carefulness with the correct guide. We should learn to encourage and not to scare people.


Yes, by default now that it is even more difficult to generate a legacy address.
There is always a risk, and this time around it could be from your own end if you don't handle things properly.

As far as I can see, your decision to switch to Electrum as a cold wallet or hot wallet will be a good one. It is because of the issues that happened recently that other Hardware wallets had problems. If you think about it, the price is expensive in the online shop and then there will be a leak.

      Electrum is okay, I've been using it for a few years, I think it's been about 6 years and so far so good, I haven't had any problems with it, as long as you always update it when it gives reminders in its own apps because if you don't do it for a long time, you may be prone to hacking because it is not updated.

Your decision is one of the best decisions one can take to ensure better security and privacy of a wallet. The cold wallet has always been the best choice for saving Bitcoin and it will always be the no 1 choice for those who know the privacy and security level of such wallets. I have never been a fan of hardware wallets and I will never suggest anyone to use it unless they have no other good options.

The Electrum is definitely the best software wallet and it works very well for the purpose. The electrum wallet supports segwit address without any problem. There are no risks involved as long as you are not connecting your old laptop to the internet. However, you'll have to keep some points in your mind if you're going with that setup. These points are very important for the safety of your wallet for long term.

The first point to keep in your mind is that you should keep that laptop in a safe place and don't let anyone touch it other than you. You should also do every measure to keep it disconnected from internet because even if it connects to internet because of a single mistake then the purpose won't be there. As o_e_l_e_o said, you should remove all those chips that might allow a Wi-Fi connection, and you should also avoid using any Wi-Fi enabled dongles on the laptop. Some of those laptops have the chips that could connect with the help Bluetooth tethering to internet so you should remove all those chips that allow Bluetooth connections.

The second point is to clean up your laptop and format the disks to avoid any malware and then install your operating system with the help of a USB device. Remember to download the operating system from the official website only and check its checksum or digital signature to confirm that it doesn't contain any malware. Once the operating system is running then you should install your wallet software and import your wallet to it.

It's always a better choice to keep your wallet in multiple storage options even if you're having it in a same device. I recommend you to install a separate SSD in your device and keep a copy of your wallet on that device as well to be safe from disk failure. If you have done all the steps carefully then you're totally safe and you won't have to worry now because no-one will be able to steal your Bitcoin from that wallet.

I won't explain pros and cons of the setup because the article is already getting very long so to keep it short I would just say that you'll be totally safe and free from any risks if you do everything carefully and according to the insutructions. Best of luck for the transition. I hope best for you!

OP, I see in your earlier thread that you are wondering how to verify Electrum wallet GPG signatures on the Windows system.
It would be better if you learned Linux if you wanted to create a secure wallet on a laptop. Since the Windows system has been proven to be unreliable many times, I would be paranoid about using it without even connecting to the internet.

I see seed signer , it is very goo projectd , but where iam very difficult to get Components , ledger frustrating me bc I paid a lot of money and premium to get ledger , and then they fuck us ,   but soon I will be on boarding on seed

Setting up your own air-gapped wallet has always been a good idea, the only thing is that it is more difficult to set up and use than a hardware wallet, i don't recommend air-gapped wallets to people who do not know what they are doing and would find it difficult to set up their air-gapped wallet in a totally safe enviroment.

Ledger let the community down with their recent mess, but there are still good hardware wallets, but if you have made up your mind to use electrum as a cold wallet in an air-gapped device, read this: https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/coldstorage.html

Well, he was talking about Ledger, which is closed source and a history of sloppiness and caring more of income than their customers.
Still, although I've missed a big part of the drama because of not having enough free time, I don't think that they canwill get the user's private seed unless the user will install an app on purpose for this.

On the other hand: OP, if you are not 100% convinced (technically) about cold storage, then there's always SeedSigner and other similar projects, 100% open source and for more normal/general hardware.

This is definetely not true. At least not with serious wallets. Usually wallets that are open source don't have any issue.

All this could be handled as risk , you can remove wifi  for example , biut all these risk not compared from hardware walked , they can at any moment take my private key 🤣

The biggest risk is usually you (or your family). You may forget to keep the cold storage always offline, you may misconfigure something - from thinking you're offline but actually being online to "go online only for a short while" (yeah, I've seen that) or to allow auto-run of the things there are on the USB stick you might use for transferring data between the cold storage and online watch only wallet. Ah, or you think you are safe with the cold storage setup and you actually use a compromised seed or you store it badly (for example in e-mail).
I am sure I didn't cover them all, but you've got the point.

I think it's a great idea, provided you take the time to make sure you really know what you are doing so you don't make any mistakes in the process.

Yes, Electrum supports segwit addresses. In fact, it only creates segwit wallets by default now.

The biggest risk is accidentally turning your cold wallet in to a hot wallet. Your old laptop needs to be permanently airgapped. This means you don't connect to the internet just to download an update, or just to broadcast a transaction, or for any other reasons. Permanent means permanent. Even better if you can open up the laptop and physically remove the WiFi card so there is no risk of you accidentally connecting to the internet in the future.

Make sure you use a good open source Linux distro, and make sure you use full disk encryption. Obviously verify your copy of Electrum on your online computer before you transfer to your airgapped computer. I prefer to use QR codes to transfer unsigned and signed transactions back and forth to remove the risk of accidentally transmitting malware via a USB drive, but always double check your QR code decodes to what you are expecting before you sign or broadcast anything.

For the ledger drama , I decided to leave hardware wallet , I don't trust any of them, i will using electrum cold wallet off line on my old laptop , and another wallet for my active mobile as watching , what do you think , what is the pro and cos , does electrum cold wallet support segwit address ? Any risk