Posted on Tue 21 March 2023 in misc • Tagged with coldcard, electrum, bitcoin
I use Electrum as my primary Bitcoin wallet (with my own full node of course) and I have a ColdCard wallet to go along with it which I use in airgapped mode. The only thing I dislike is that the wallet is unencrypted and can only be encrypted and decrypted …
Posted on Thu 09 March 2023 in misc • Tagged with Passwords, XKCD, Dice words
Many of you may have seen the famous XKCD cartoon regarding password strength where Randall Munroe, the author, advocates creating a passphrase based on four random words and remembering it by creating a sentence containing the words. If you've already seen the cartoon, before actually clicking the link, let …
Posted on Tue 22 February 2022 in misc • Tagged with Cryptography, ECDSA, Schnorr
This blog describes at a technical level how Ellyptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) is used for signing Bitcoin transactions. Caveat emptor: I am not a mathematician let alone a cryptographer. I created this document mainly for helping myself understand how ECC is applied and welcome any correction on errors present …
Posted on Sat 08 January 2022 in misc • Tagged with docker, podman
I have been using djbdns for several years now and I still love it. Tiny, secure, maybe not as beginner friendly but I don't mind that. I previously used an RPM file that I first build on Enterprise Linux 6 which cleanly build on EL7 as well, but EL8 is …
Posted on Tue 26 November 2019 in misc • Tagged with usb, uefi, legacy bios, bitcoin
This manual describes the content and usage of the “BTCStick” USB pen drive. This is a bootable USB disk image that contains various bitcoin related tools to use offline. The system was developed for the author’s personal use case to safely run such tools. The stick was inspired …
Posted on Thu 27 June 2019 in misc • Tagged with usb, uefi, legacy bios
I had a need for a USB stick with an installed version of Linux that was bootable with UEFI (and Secure Boot) as well as Legacy BIOS. I couldn't use a live stick because I needed to employ an encrypted Luks root filesystem and swap partition because it would contain …