Author

Topic: Is the recovery key one factor access to 2FA or multisig? (Read 870 times)

full member
Activity: 126
Merit: 100
Who says you need both your private keys in the same place?  Split the seed in half and give half to a trusted friend.  You'll only need it for recovery. 

The local wallet only stores the first private key and it's encrypted.

Thanks, I didn't know that. I thought the seed == the wallet, and so both the wallet and the seed have all 2FA private keys. I'll have to double check, but that sounds good.

Thanks!
newbie
Activity: 28
Merit: 0
you can use the seed to recover your wallet .

Of course it's good to be able to recover without trustedcoin, but that's the point of 2-of-3 (compared to 2-of-2), and giving another party sole access to the third recovery signature.

Requiring both your private keys be in one place, as Electrum advises, seems to render multisig useless...

Right?


Who says you need both your private keys in the same place?  Split the seed in half and give half to a trusted friend.  You'll only need it for recovery. 

The local wallet only stores the first private key and it's encrypted.
legendary
Activity: 3710
Merit: 1586
you can use the seed to recover your wallet .

Of course it's good to be able to recover without trustedcoin, but that's the point of 2-of-3 (compared to 2-of-2), and giving another party sole access to the third recovery signature.

Requiring both your private keys be in one place, as Electrum advises, seems to render multisig useless...

Right?


There are two types of multisig wallets in electrum:

A) 2fa with trusted coin
B) multisig. 2 of 2 or 2 of 3. no third party like trustedcoin is involved with this wallet type.

In the case of the type A the wallet mnemonic is indeed displayed at the time of wallet creation but it is not saved to disk. You are advised to start the wallet creation on an offline system and then move the wallet file to an online one to complete the wallet creation.

In the case of B if you use multiple devices you never have all the private keys on one system. I recommend B.

full member
Activity: 126
Merit: 100
you can use the seed to recover your wallet .

Of course it's good to be able to recover without trustedcoin, but that's the point of 2-of-3 (compared to 2-of-2), and giving another party sole access to the third recovery signature.

Requiring both your private keys be in one place, as Electrum advises, seems to render multisig useless...

Right?
staff
Activity: 3500
Merit: 6152
2FA works just fine , but if you want to stop using TrustedCoin for one reason or another , or they got hacked or something , then you can use the seed to recover your wallet .

Quote
Note: The “restore” option should be used only if you no longer want to use TrustedCoin, or if there is a problem with the service. Once you have restored your wallet in this way, two of three factors are on your machine, negating the special protection of this type of wallet.

I personally see it good that way , imagine the amount of people that will be damaged if TrustedCoin goes down or get hacked ?
full member
Activity: 126
Merit: 100
I didn't see it, but if this has already been answered somewhere, I'd be grateful for the link.

I'd like to use electrum 2FA + trustedcoin for a 2-of-3 cool wallet.

The suggestion at http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/2fa.html says that I can recover my wallet without trustedcoin, all by myself, with just the seed. That doesn't seem like 2FA to me! (The instructions for multisig seem similar.)

I think the way to avoid the my-backup-bypasses-all-my-2fa problem is this:
  • I have one private key. I backup mine.
  • Trusted coin has one private key. They backup theirs.
  • A friend as one private key. She backs up hers.

In other words, I don't want to backup all my keys in one place.

Can I do this with Electrum? Any suggestions?

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