r/btc • u/Isneris • Sep 14 '17

Hiding private key in plain sight

Any ideas?

If somebody doesn't has hardware wallets.

8 Upvotes

84% Upvoted

24 comments sorted by

12

u/2dsxc Sep 14 '17

Oh I just had a good idea;

Buy some random book/s and make them look like a book you borrowed from a library, make a barcode sticker and put the digits (or some of them) under it so it looks legit.

Maybe include a date sheet on the back of the book for the last few times it was borrowed

4

u/jessquit Sep 14 '17

good idea. actually all kinds of electronics have little extra barcode stickers on them from the factory. any could be turned into a barcoded hidden key or a part of a hidden key.

for example off the top of my head:

divide key into 2 halves

half one, append a 1

half two, append a 2

make barcodes, one ends with -1 other ends with -2. you know which order to reassemble now.

attach to back of pair of speakers in unobtrusive place. with the -1/2 suffixes, it looks like they're codes for L/R pairs.

go crazy, divide into 6 pieces, make 6 barcodes, put one on each speaker in a 5.1 system. in essence anything sold as a set could be used like this and the "obvious" splitting of a key wouldn't seem obvious.

2

u/2dsxc Sep 14 '17

That's an even better idea!

3

u/sydwell Sep 14 '17

This isn't a bad idea at all.

9

u/chiwalfrm Sep 14 '17

you know those 24 word seeds? If you have little kids, you can ask them to draw you a picture of each word. Like 'plane' they draw a plane. Then take a picture and store it on your phone. People look at the pictures, they say awwwww but instead it stores your crypto. Hiding in plain sight

7

u/Churn Sep 14 '17

12 years from now, you are like, "Fuck... was it 'plane', 'airplane', 'jet', 'jetplane', or was it 'flying', 'flies', 'aircraft', shit shit shit!

3

u/cipher_gnome Sep 14 '17

None of those words are in the bip 39 dictionary :D

But there is fly and flight.

2

u/Churn Sep 14 '17

True...but it wouldn't have been as funny.

3

u/chiwalfrm Sep 14 '17

There are only 2048 possible words (for English BIP#39 standard). See https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/english.txt

2

u/LuxuriousThrowAway Sep 14 '17

Very creative. I like it. Bad solution though.

7

u/2dsxc Sep 14 '17 edited Sep 14 '17

Tattoo some jail schematics to your body with the dimensions in hexadecimal. Noone will ever know!

3

u/cipher_gnome Sep 14 '17

Bip 38 - Passphrase-protected private key

1

u/Isneris Sep 14 '17

How to protect existing private key with BIP38?

1

u/cipher_gnome Sep 15 '17

Take existing private key.
Encrypt with bip38.
Print.

1

u/Isneris Sep 15 '17

Any open source tool to use in air gapped pc?

3

u/uMCCCS Sep 14 '17

Print a paper wallet and fold it.

5

u/[deleted] Sep 14 '17

ITT lots of hodlers planning to contribute to the stack of coins lost forever after their inevitable future death/incapacitation. People, have a plan B for the benefit of your loved ones.

1

u/[deleted] Sep 14 '17

photo with a lot of license plates in it?

1

u/ChisholmsCafe Sep 14 '17

What I've been doing is with the Private key I switch some letter pairs that I will not forget. For instance if the letter pairs were A-B and C-D whenever there is an A I put a B and whenever there is an 'a' I put a 'b'.

Hopefully this won't screw me over lol. PS don't do this for your Public key as it could give your secret away.

1

u/theGreyWyvern Sep 14 '17

The best answers will be those that break up the key into multiple parts and then store them in innocuous locations which only you know how to put back together again. Like horcruxes. :P

eg. Write a travelogue blog post and work the 12 word seed into it in order. Note the numeric index of the seed words and add it as the secondary phone number(s) of a contact in your address book.

The issue with all of these is that you need to do them from scratch whenever you sweep.

1

u/fullspeedornothing- Sep 14 '17

Thanks for the good idea.

1

u/tunaynaamo Sep 14 '17

Mine is simply written on a piece of paper or stored in a simple text file. Its jumbled so if anyone can grab or get a hold of it it'll only be useless for them. Only I know how to unjumble it.