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When I read pyramids' answer, I was very skeptical. It didn't really seem right to me that addresses generated from a hash (in this case from a public key) would have anything but a random distribution. To test out the distribution of addresses, I downloaded the dataset linked to in this forum thread and counted up how many times addresses appeared. There ...
8
It is better to download the actual code from:
https://github.com/pointbiz/bitaddress.org
(this link is from the bitaddress.org site, no need to trust me :-)
Click the "Download ZIP" button.
Restart your computer. **
Make sure you do not have an internet connection enabled (WIFI disabled, Ethernet unplugged).
Open the zip file.
Open Chrome or Firefox.
Drag ...
5
Very few bitcoin addresses map to addresses with any lower-case initial letter (after the 1) or any upper-case letter that comes after Q in the alphabet. All the bitcoin-base-58 encoding characters before Q and except 1 are at least almost equally frequent, and all those after Q as well but far less frequent, with Q being in-between and 1 being even less ...
3
NO. Using an online source to generate private keys is incredibly unsafe for a variety of reasons. The best way would be to produce the private keys offline either with a Hardware Wallet or private keys generated from an air-gapped computer with a Bitcoin client installed on it that is capable of functioning as a wallet. Once the private key stores bitcoins, ...
3
No, they're not the same thing. Paper wallets are not generated differently as/in to comparison to normal wallets.
a bitcoin adress is part of a public key.
The address is at its most basic just a hash of the public key. The hash functions involved (RIPEMD-160 and SHA256) are cryptographic hash functions. They are often also referred to as one-way functions,...
3
bitaddress.org does not use the same private keys for paper wallet generation as for the single wallet. It uses the same initial entropy that you provide, but new private keys are generated for the paper wallet. Thus the addresses are different.
3
The certificate for www.bitaddress.org is issued by PositiveSSL. Chrome trusts them (PositiveSSL), firefox does not.
There are an awful lot of issuers, and different browsers are bound to have slightly different lists.
If you trust them or not is up to you. If you trust Chrome's security, then you can trust that certificate.
If you "add exception", then ...
3
who has actually verified the code is not malicious in the first place?
There are many eyes on it from cryptographers, javascript programmers and more. But there has been no commercial party or individual who claims to have vetted the page to assure that there is nothing malicious.
As far as verifying that the website is serving the same release as the ...
2
In order to reach the testnet version of bitaddress you must append ?testnet=true to the url:
https://www.bitaddress.org/bitaddress.org-v2.9.3-SHA1-7d47ab312789b7b3c1792e4abdb8f2d95b726d64.html?testnet=true
2
To answer your question: bitaddress.org uses the SHA-256 hash of the password you provided as the private key. Therefore, you can always derive that private key from your password. If you can write a few lines of code, you can test this yourself (I just did).
However, if you generated your passphrase using dice then you are unlikely to memorize it. ...
2
It's challenging to answer this without a clear definition of what you mean by "safe." I'll assume your two main concerns are (A) loss by theft; and (B) loss by user error.
For (A) you're "safe." You followed offline cold storage wallet generation procedure and your private key was not exposed in an online-hackable way. You have the same level of theft ...
1
I think this comes down more to semantics than anything else (and thus might make the question off-topic as opinion based), but I'll give it a shot.
I would classify BitAddress or WarpWallet as standalone programs (or even scripts, although I would lean towards program since they are interactive), much in the same class as a calculator app. Yes, they don't ...
1
What you describe has some risks:
The new PC and router likely won't have the latest software updates, which could increase the chance of it being compromised immediately
The bitaddress.org website may have been compromised, in which case it may generate pre-determined addresses that are monitored for stealing coins deposited to them. This is a real and ...
1
1) Google how to verify a PGP signature
2) Import author's PGP sig (from the main Web site), use procedure from 1) to verify contents of
https://www.bitaddress.org/CHANGELOG.txt.asc (and obtain SHA256 sum of the latest release, although you can get that from Github as well)
(If you trust Github and want to use an offline copy, you could skip 1) and 2) and ...
1
This has been an issue with their TOR service for over a year. They claim that they're trying to fix the problem, but I don't believe them anymore. They can't be this incompetent. Their service is pretty much unusable. If I knew of a decent alternative, I'd switch immediately and never use blockchain.info again.
1
Depends on what you are going to do with your address. As for me there are three main cases to consider:
Will you store so huge amouts of bitcoin to fear attackers who are targeting yourself directly?
Are your computer as unsecure as most of non-technical people computers (and therefore: is it possible that it is already infected by some virus)?
Or last but ...
1
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Technical_background_of_version_1_Bitcoin_addresses - you can read about how to generate adresses by yourself. You can also use getnewaddress RPC command to generate a lot of adresses. dumpprivkey can show private keys for them.
You can use http://blockexplorer.com/testnet to see what's going on testnet.
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