Topic: Turn photos into Bitcoin wallets (Read 529 times)

You are suspicious if you look and act suspicious. I don't know how you can avoid acting suspicious, but, for example, when I travel, I try to dress down as much as possible and wear the most "airport friendly" clothes, not too much metal on me, or plastic belt buckles, backpack with laptop and clear plastic envelope containing my travel documents clearly visible (maybe this is a mistake and should have shielded envelopes to prevent hackers from stealing my data wireless) ... I don't travel very much, but I've made about half a dozen international trips between South East Asia and North America over the past decade (so, like once every couple of years).

The most recent one being this year as I had to take care of father burial / cremation / praying and other issues.

Also knowing it could have been an issue, was prepared with as many pre-landing requirements as possible, online check-in, online vax QR codes and all that.

We all know random checks are never really random and if you are always getting random checked, it's either you are already on some list, or you just look "profile-able" and security is just discriminating and there is nothing you can do about it.

If you look different, smell different, walk and act different, sound different, you will get "random" checked and that's just the way it is.

If you travel with a laptop, tablet, or phone, you can stick in a microSD card in there without actually installing it (or it's just taped to the back of the battery; not visible).

Little piece of paper hidden together with your travel itinerary, boarding pass, passport and bunch of tourist looking documents? They probably won't bother opening it.

If you're coming from some 3rd world country and traveling to the US, and you are single, young, female, unemployed ... 100% guaranteed you'll get all your bags searched and have an interview with immigration officers.

They can always think you are suspicious and things you mentioned are probably the first places they will look to find if you hide anything.
In addition to writing seed words I would remember one or more passphrases and use main account only as decoy with smaller amount of coins, so even if they confiscate this it won't be worst thing that could happen.
This would help not only with customs while crossing borders, but also with unexpected case of getting attacked and robbed by someone.

If you really want to use photos, make a brand new one that no one else is going to ever use. Basically turn your camera into it's own TRNG. Don't use a phone or anything that can connect to anything, or make sure it is permanently offline.

As for backups or traveling across dangerous international borders, can always scribble the seed words and hide it in your clothes / shoes / physical wallet. You'll have to get creative depending on your circumstances, but most people can travel in airports with a laptop or tablet with no issues.

There are trustless ways to set up bitcoin inheritance though, which are far superior to anything which relies on the trustworthiness of either the inheritor(s) or a third party. Multi-sig between a bunch of friends and relatives can work, but you then have to be absolutely sure that a threshold number of these people won't try to steal from you. Splitting between friends/relatives and a will held by a reputable law firm is probably a bit more secure, but it still isn't trustless by any means.

Timelocked transactions, on the other hand, can be completely trustless. The person in possession of the timelocked transaction (if you choose to give it to them before you die and not just lock it in a safe in your house, for example), cannot use that transaction to steal from you. As long as you either invalidate the transaction by moving any of the inputs before it is valid, or destroy it if it is safely secured and no one has accessed it, and then replace it with a new one, then this is a trustless way to set up your inheritance.

Not without getting super creative, which would likely result in either over complicating things or not making things complicated enough, i.e taking a picture of a bunch of skittles which spells out the word "that". Obviously, it would defeat the point of this.

Although, if you're doing this for inheritance sake you could potentially just generate a new wallet, until you get a seed which you can include pictures of. Since, there won't be any Bitcoin it in at this point.

Obviously, I think I made it clear before that I'm pretty against this method, and as above it's just better to go the will route. If you want to allow someone to inherit your Bitcoin, there's a cost to it. Some way, you are definitely going to reduce your security, and open up an attack vector. However, while that is pretty unavoidable you should be trying to reduce that risk as much as possible, even if you can't completely mitigate it.

But why? By doing all that you are introducing additional risk that someone figures out your system and steals your coins, as well as additional risk that your family forget the system or forget how to decipher the photos. So higher risk of theft and higher risk of loss.

If you want to leave something to a family member while also requiring something from your will as in your example, then either hand them an encrypted seed phrase with the decryption key in your will, or hand them one seed phrase from a 2-of-2 multi-sig with the other one in your will.

That won't work for all words. I made a test-seed, and one of the words is "that". You can't print a picture of "that".

Well this project actually gave me an idea to hide a 12 word seed, by simply creating a Coffee table book with pictures that has all the words in the Seed in front of you, but not actually showing that it is a 12 word seed.

You can tell your family in your "Will" to take the Coffee table book with pictures on the shelve to decipher your 12 word Seed for your coins.. and they will be able to get access to your wallet.

Just leave instructions and clues in your "Will" ...so that nobody else with access to it, will be able to use it. (Example : My first Coffee table book are left to my brother John" ..... John will know what to do with that information, because he knows about the Book and you have shown him in advance how to use seed phrases. 

My main concern on this is: People might get an idea of storing a (physical) printed picture in their vault as the backup
and use the original/scanned image file to make a key pair.
Since there's already a physical backup, they might consider deleting the original image.

That wont work since a scanned image wont have the same hash as the original image used to create the key pair.
Every scan will also produce a slightly different image, thus, different hash.
Without the original image file that processed by this tool, users wont be able to recover their funds.

The good part is, the author of the lib already knows it and is mentioned on the ReadMe. This is like a blueprint to create a more secure system based on the analogy here


How about we use mp4/video files and process random timestamps to create a more secure way of storing seeds? 

Storing stuff in your brain memory is probably worst thing you can do long term, and I would never do it myself.
I know that with age your memory gets worse and everyone is starting to forget memorized things more often as they get older.
As a temporary solution memorizing seed phrase can be useful, or in case when you are crossing a border and you don't want to bring any paper/metal backup, but that is it.

I would say the two are not comparable.

We all know that memorizing your seed phrase is a poor back up. But, if you want to take a seed phrase which was securely and randomly generated and try to memorize it in addition to having proper paper back ups, then that's fine. There is a small additional security risk (in that you could accidentally reveal it when drunk, for example, or that you might take less care with your proper back ups since you are falsely reassured by your memory), but ultimately, remembering it in addition to proper back ups is unlikely to cause you any harm.

This method is different, however. You cannot take a securely and randomly generated seed phrase and encode it in to pictures using this method. You must first start with pictures, use them to generate a wallet, and then extract the seed phrase from that wallet (if that is even possible at all - I've not examined the code but the screenshots show the tool spitting out a raw private key rather than a seed phrase). A couple of pictures from your hard drive is not a true source of entropy, and whatever it generates will not be as secure as a properly generated seed phrase. Not to mention that many people would use this on an online computer, leave traces or logs of what they have done, back up the pictures online, and so on.

It's an interesting concept, but no one should actually use it to store any coins unless you are fully willing to lose them all.

I think many here are missing the point.

This is to have fun with it, to have an extra backup method that looks nice. It's similar to how cool it is that you can memorize your seed phrase, basically storing your wealth in your mind. Sure, you also should have the standard backups, but these extra methods are interesting and fun to have as well.

And then you also need to back up your deep learning model, and hope it doesn't make any mistakes when identifying your pictures.

If your goal is to have a picture on your wall which can somehow be used to recover your wallet, then the safest way to do this would be to simply write your seed phrase (encrypted, if you like) around the edge and then put it inside a frame which covers your writing.

Every additional suggestion on top of the original idea is simply adding layers upon layers of complexity without actually adding any more security. The most likely outcome from one of these complex ideas is that you lock yourself out of your wallet by mistake.

Maybe using some kind of QR code or something similar that would be incorporated inside picture would work.
You don't really have to use complete picture for scanning, but just one smaller part and it doesn't really matter what resolution you use in this case.
Problem is how to make something obvious and hidden in the same time... maybe making something like QR code artwork and only small section would work for scanning

This was $50,000 just few years ago, and it can have much different value in future!
Bitcoin puzzles are fun but there is always someone smarter than creator who could solve them, and I don't want that with my private keys or seed words
I know there are many ways of hiding information inside digital photos but it's obviously much harder to do that with real life photos.

This reminds me of a Bitcoin puzzle a few years back, which was called 'The Legend of Satoshi Nakamoto'.

At the time of solving, it contained more than 5BTC. It looks pretty nice as well.

Not sure how this project in particular encodes the images to generate the wallet, but in theory you could be able to train a deep learning model to describe each photo with a word from the seed phrase.

That way you would be able to crop, resize, and change the appearance of the photo a bit, and still be able to recover the wallet, as the deep learning model would still generate the correct word for each photo.

I would still only use this as a novelty only thing, since it's not really secure.

Not using this method. It doesn't matter how good quality your prints are or how high tech your scanner is, if you scan to the exact same resolution in the exact same format with the exact same metadata - the file your scanner generates will never match the file you originally used. The picture in the file might look the same, but even a single pixel off by an imperceptible degree and your hash output will be different.

You could maybe put a bunch of files on a digital photo frame (as long as you are sure the photo frame doesn't compress them or similar) and still recover the same wallet from them, but I still wouldn't suggest it given the reasons we've discussed above.

Interface of this project reminds me on dreadful google captchas (that we are all tired from), but it could be useful for storing smaller amount of coins aka for pocket wallet.
Even on his github page he is saiyng that this method is less secure than generating regular seed phrases, but I have to admit that using phots is real simple way of doing it.
Problem I see with this approach is that some AI program could possible crack this much easier than normal seed words, using some photo recognition software.

My question is could you actually use custom made photo(s) that you could print and hang on your wallet as a piece of art in obvious place, but that art would hide bitcoin inside?
Scanning photo(s) would give you access to your keys, and you could even make mini printed version and keep it in your wallet, for international travels.
I wouldn't keep anything important on cloud aka someone else computer, even if files are encrypted.

I also said the following, though...
I may be wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure that you can't alter a zip archive (other than opening it and archiving the contents again) without making it unusable. Sure, you could modify its metadata, but that won't alter the files inside of it. I'm also pretty sure it has error correction, so a password-protected zip archive stored in multiple places could work.

Maybe it wasn't clear, but I myself wouldn't use it and don't recommend using such a scheme.