Hacker News Reader

Comment by drivebyacct2 | Hacker News Reader

I find Bitcoin cool. I love open source and I love web services. That having been said, I will very happily use an offline client for my Bitcoin needs. Not one that connects to the Internet and not one that primarily or even secondarily works via it.

(Yes, I'm more paranoid than most, I do keep them on an "offline" jump drive and sign transactions offline. But at the very least, I'd use Bitcoin-Qt, or Armory with encryption. I'll give this a closer look but it gives me the heebie-jeebies, maybe I'm wrong for feeling that.)

It certainly looks nice and usable, though!

View on HN

I don't think this is paranoid at all, so far all the online hosted wallet services, including exchanges, are young companies run by few people with usually questionable technical competence, and hence are very prone to being hacked every now and then. There's no "Google" of Bitcoin yet that you could to some extent trust.

How do you send/receive transactions to/from the blockchain, then?

Amory's tutorial explains transacting using an offline wallet:

https://bitcoinarmory.com/using-offline-wallets-in-armory/

Note that I sign transaction offline. To put it simply your address is a private key, from which a public key (the public address) is derived. You can have one client, synced to the Blockchain, displaying your balanced, able to make transactions.

Then you take that transaction to an offline computer or source and sign it, take it back to the online computer and transmit it to the network. /roughly, see the other link for better information

Are you signing it manually? Or just doing some go-arounds with Bitcoin-qt? I'm really interested in this, but never found any python scripts or how-to's.

How do you allocate change address' etc as well?

Look into the Armory client and some guides on how to do offline signing with it. It is also a deterministic wallet so your backups and offline computer will never run out of change addresses.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com