Topic: Physical device to generate public/private key pairs - page 2. (Read 4681 times)
looks like $12 for a used credit card machine...I found a PC/USB cable for $50...I've yet to find a programming manual...
I have the SDK and compiler for Vx series, the cheapest model it supports being Vx510 (and the other models not having anything compelling that would do a better job of this)
I keep pitching credit card machines for this, since obsolete ones are available cheaply, they run C/C++, and have a satisfactory sized screen and printer for the purpose.
That's not a bad idea. ...off to ebay... 
An app could do it...and there's lots of ways to do it on a computer...My thoughts were more along the line of security...
Even a non-connecting physical device doesn't offer more security per se.
If it's a physical device, it's usually closed source software, which means
a malicious vendor could program it to "generate" keys that are not really random, and that could be harvested at later time...
I suppose you could easily use my little "Deep Space Vagabond" application on an offline, freshly installed computer, to generate new addresses at the click of a button. See link in my signature. Source code to the very first version (which was a command-line Python script) is freely available to all, while source code for later versions is available to donators.
Alternatively if you're comfortable running Python command-line scripts, someone (I need to remember their name) made a wonderful little script doing just what you want. You could set up a Python environment on an offline computer, and then generate your keys using that script. If you're interested I can you look it up and post it here for you.
One last option is to use the fantastic vanitygen command-line tool directly. It is actually what my app relies on for generating addresses.
EDIT: at first, I didn't realize you were looking to build such a device yourself - sp my post is mostly irrelevant
I keep pitching credit card machines for this, since obsolete ones are available cheaply, they run C/C++, and have a satisfactory sized screen and printer for the purpose.
An app could do it...and there's lots of ways to do it on a computer...My thoughts were more along the line of security...
How hard would it be to build an electronic device that could generate and display a Bitcoin public / private key pair? It would be nice to have a physical device that could, without connecting to anything, give you a new safe address to dump your coins to at the press of a button.
I suppose someone can write an app for that?
How hard would it be to build an electronic device that could generate and display a Bitcoin public / private key pair? It would be nice to have a physical device that could, without connecting to anything, give you a new safe address to dump your coins to at the press of a button.
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