Bitcoin wallet auf USB stick / Dogecoin hashrate wallet

Recently I’ve been looking at Bitcoin. It’s a brilliant system that I believe will change the world, but for all its brilliance, at present, it’s effectively as safe as keeping digital cash under your mattress. Everyone is used to banks and FDIC insurance, so going back to this way of old-style way of protecting your money takes some getting used to. You have to realise the onus of responsibility is on you to protect your wallet, and there is no insurance.

So with that motivation, here’s my instructions on how to create a personal Fort Knox to store your Bitcoin Mattress Wallet. I achieve this by installing an new linux operating system on a convenient USB stick. To use it, you just plug it in and reboot your system. Why go to this effort? Because if your Windows PC has a new Bitcoin or key-logging virus, all your bitcoins will be stolen. Irrevocably.

After much research on linux variants, I choose the Ubuntu operating system, which is a popular and secure version of linux with a nice interface. Then I made it a bit more secure.
Please Note : This is my first serious foray in to installing & configuring Linux, so I may have done something wrong. Please correct me if you have a suggestion!

Ingredients :

- USB stick or two, 4Gb or more. I used two 8Gb sticks
- A Windows PC. or two.

Instructions :

1) Download PenDrive Linux. Install Ubuntu 11.04 on to your USB stick.

2) If you have a 2nd PC, insert the USB stick and reboot the machine. You may need to change your boot order settings in the bios to boot from the USB drive. If you don’t have a 2nd PC, print off these instructions.

3) Install Ubuntu to your pendrive. Select the option to encrypt your home directory. Choose a STRONG password, and write it down on a piece of paper or two. Something with 20 characters, no dictionary words, and containing lower & upper case letters, numbers and symbols. Do not use anything you’ve used before. You can use if you need help making a strong password. Why? This is essentially the keys to your wallet. If someone steals or copies the USB stick, they’ll have time to crack it, so it has to be impossible for a computer to open by brute force. For long-term safety, you have to anticipate that GPU password cracking is going to improve massively over the next 5 years. Especially as Bitcoin now provides a financial incentive to develop & buy encryption cracking hardware.