- NEM will use something similar to Bitcoin's wallet.dat system.
fek it.. i really like brain wallets.. :/
you know the way electrum allows you to enter a seed to retrieve your wallet and then your wallet.dat password to access coins.. could you do something like this? so you end up with your seed passphrase that, i suppose downloads?, your wallet.dat from the cloud(if you have put it there) to what ever client your using, and then you can enter your wallet.dat password or something... giving the portability of a brainwallet but also the security of being able to create wallets offline like bitcoin? best of both worlds!
could this be done?
1. client creates wallet file. (now usable only on currwent computer system same as any other bitcoin wallet.dat file)
2. if you want brainwallet protablility, you create + save a passphrase, encrypt wallet file using passphrase as the key, tag it with an alias to find it easily, upload to the nem cloud(if there is/will be one)
3. to access from any other client you click find wallet, enter tag, auto-download(or run from cloud if its possible to save download time and effort) wallet, enter passphrase to decrypt wallet and wallet is now usable. security of wallet.dat(if not uploaded to cloud) and portability of brainwallet with out hardware or paper wallet.
Sounds like a "normal" wallet only that you can store it in the cloud (if this a centralized cloud this is actually really not cool at all) and you have an extra "password" called seed that acts as kind of a backup key. Nothing really special about that imho. It's actually exactly how the Ripple wallet works or rather worked before they had a downloadable stand alone client. I haven't checked that client out yet.
Here's why I think brainwallets are in no way more portable than old fashioned wallets...
For brainwallets to be secure you need a strong password. In this case strong means a password that you will most definitely not be able to remember which means you have to keep it somwhere. If you keep that password in a file there is no difference anymore to a wallet.dat. You have to carry around both of those files to access your funds. At least the wallet is encrypted (if you choose to do so, I think this will be standard for NEM but I'm not sure).
Now people come and yell "password manager" in my face.
First - I wouldn't trust some thirdparty maybe even closed source tool to hold all my passwords encrypted or not. Secondly this again takes out the portability. You have to install that darn manager everywhere and at some point you may end up on a device where that manager isn't available.