Hey all, what’s the current options or securing MAID?
Hardware wallets?
Paper wallets?
Cold storage computer?
Please get me up to speed.
Thanks
lol this isn’t an area that has rapid updates or news 
ever.
same old same old, make secure BTC addresses, keep private keys safe (offline), send MAID there for holding, until network launch.
Anywhere I can find a guide for MAID cold storage?
Depends on how much you know now.
If you have MAID and know how to send then one way is to
- go to bitaddress.org
- made a bitcoin address by following their instructions
- record “on paper” the address and private key
- send your MAID to the address
- remember to send a few dollars worth of BTC as well since you need to pay fees when you finally import the private key to send your MAID elsewhere
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As far as I know, no hardware wallets support the Omni protocol yet. You could use the Bitcoin address in a hardware wallet to store MAID of course, but with having to gain access to the private key of the Bitcoin address to access the MAID, it is kind of pointless (normally the private key would stay hidden inside the hardware wallet…that’s the whole point). So IMO paper wallets are still the way to go for MAID.
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The only option I’m aware of is Armory on an offline computer (Tablet / laptop with 64-bit windows easiest, Linux / Raspberry pi if you’re an expert / want to spend hours messing around to get it working).
Clunky compared to a Trezor or similar, but a workable hardware wallet solution. Hopefully slicker options will develop in time, as I know the Omni team have been looking into it for a long time.
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Interesting. Sounds like a good option for sweeping the paper wallets.
I found this tutorial on using Armory for offline transaction signing, with the Omniwallet web wallet being used to broadcast the signed transaction.
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Fair enough. The key point, regardless of approach, is keeping the private keys offline and signing the transactions offline.
edit: should have also including ‘generate offline’, in addition to store and sign offline.
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Can I ask you to create a new address and see if you can generate its private key to “prove” the “when you need to do so”
I ask for myself & others and in particular for yourself so you don’t get caught later on. Obviously the address you generate is a throwaway address since the private key will exist outside of your hardware wallet when you do the test.
Im not sure if this helps… I’m trying to follow your concern. The seed creates a master Key … in HD … the same master key always, and… Then that master key creates a tree of private keys… The same private keys .
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Ah yes, I want to ensure that there are no hiccups in that process. It would not be the first time that something that should work doesn’t because of some reason and if something were to go wrong its an expensive hiccup.
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That is exactly how Hierarchal Deterministic Deterministic wallets work.
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Only thing could go wrong is wrong seed used. But I totally get why your concerned. Smart.
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Yes its the results of a failure.
It could be as simple as the algorithm in the h/w wallet being different to the others/standard., or the h/w inverts the seed or a number of other mistakes and/or BUGS.
I thought it would be a simple thing to confirm all is good and well worth the test considering what is at stake.
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The reason I don’t advise using a hardware wallet like Ledger Nano S for MAID is because most people will probably store other cryptos on the hardware wallet as well. The key selling point of the hardware wallet is that it always keeps the private keys isolated inside. When you start messing about to retrieve your private keys, this sanctity is broken, and you are left with the same security as if you had used a paper wallet, provided that you did your paper wallet generation offline. If you are using the hardware wallet only for MAID, it is a valid option as it at least takes care of the offline generation and storage aspects for you. Just no offline signing without retrieving your private keys until there is Omni support.
About a month ago, I purchased MAID on poloniex. I created and stored the MAID on Omniwallet.org. To test trial cold storage, because I’m new, I created a bitcoin address. And only sent a small amount of my MAID to cold storage while writing down my address and private keys on a piece of paper (also on another piece of paper in another safe location). The 10 MAID coins I sent to the bitcoin address are still there which is obviously good/expected, but now I’m a little nervous about sending the rest of my MAID coins that are still in my Omniwallet.org only because I’m nervous about the private key (that begins with a 6) not working when I eventually want to move them to a secure wallet. Like if Coinbase ever decides to implement Safecoin down the road (is that the plan?). Should I just test trial sending the 10 MAID coins that are in my bitcoin address now? If so, where should I send them and where would I enter my private key in order to send them?
Excellent! Thank you for the help! I will certainly look into the Armory Offline Addresses as well as an Asus Eee Pad. I will play around with that this weekend!
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I couldn’t be bothered figuring out armory. I just waited until a very old laptop was ready to retire and then loaded up bitaddress, switched off the router and my wifi on the laptop, generated a bunch of keys, printed them off and then turned the laptop off (for good) before turning the router back on. Now I have a bunch of safe key pairs I can pull out of my file if and when I need to use them. That seemed fairly secure to me, but I’m not very tech savvy and happy to be enlightened if I’m wrong?
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Not bad. Could also make a flash drive into a bootable Linux for free and use bitaddress on that (and format / delete it after) instead of needing to throw away a laptop or wait for it to retire. Just options
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Has anyone ever stress tested these different approaches to estimate the relative risk do you know? As an aside, I’d have thought the biggest danger is forgetting where you’ve left your paper wallet, USB stick or whatever, or having someone else ‘tidy’ them away. I speak from experience…
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