Paper Wallet - Perform this software QA test yourself. You may be glad you did.

Photoshop credit to @phneep.

It’s so sad that I have to do this.  Lord knows, I tried like mad to avoid it.  I owe it to investors whenever I discover something good, bad or ugly. And being unable to recover my cold storage is ugly.  Consider me a troll or whatever, I am speaking from a place of personal expertise.  I have made an embarrassingly big investment in the coin of topic, which shall remain unnamed, and I continue to have holdings, to some degree, against my will.  Note that all this has been communicated to the relevant developers to no avail.  Read on …

Do yourself a big favor and follow me here.   This is a super easy test to perform and it will validate or invalidate your ability to not only create a paper wallet and make a deposit into it  ( the easy part ) but to also be able to recover that address into a live wallet.  It really is a testimony to Satoshi that this is so darn easy to do yet, be warned, your coin may actually fail this simple and foundational use case.  One of my main investments failed this test when I ran it last week.

Ignore security here, which is discussed at great length elsewhere, and for our test we need only use a tiny amount of coin.

Step 1:  Create a paper wallet.

Go the the appropriate web page for your coin of choice and make a paper wallet; save information as I show in the example below:

You have probably seen a java client side wallet generator before.  All we need is the public and private keys.

It produces something like this.   Throughout this piece, I am using NODEV coin only as an example.

NODEV Address

NLLZKCRbcJJ26k4ZRcj2t6HaUebXjRxQjt

SHARE

NLLZKCRbcJJ26k4ZRcj2t6HaUebXjRxQjt

6zTsPo8ZHrdn8KHSEuY35KyKDFdNaRvQZyQg32BatcFJvTZyyb2

The short string is the public key and the long string is the private key.  Normally you will never ever ever share the private key as it, all by itself, allows anyone to recover the cold storage into a live wallet, as I will soon demonstrate.

Step 2: deposit a small quantity of coin using your QT wallet.

From you coin’s QT wallet or coind, send 5 NODEV to the public address you generated above:

./coind sendtoaddress NLLZKCRbcJJ26k4ZRcj2t6HaUebXjRxQjt 5

 

Step 3:  Use the NODEV block explorer to verify the deposit into cold storage.

After you see confirmation in the sending wallet, you should be able to verify same with a block explorer.

Step 4: recover the coins into a live wallet.

Using the console of a QT wallet or a coind window directly

issue the following command

./coind importprivkey 6zTsPo8ZHrdn8KHSEuY35KyKDFdNaRvQZyQg32BatcFJvTZyyb2

The funds should appear in the hot wallet.   If they don’t, or you get an error message, you and your coin development team have a serious problem.

Other articles by rebphil that you might enjoy. 

Dark Wallet     Alpha Test Introduction    Dark Lobby   Alpha 4 update  Alpha 5 released

Learning Crypto     DHM Key exchange     Eliptical Curve DSA     Greedy Mining

CannaCoin     IRC tipbot wallet     CannaStore     Growers investing in mining ops

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