Cryptocurrency | Talkera

If you forgot your bitcoin wallet password you may just be able to recover it. We have discussed some other tools before such as Pywallet. Another password recovery tool, called btcrecover, is designed for the case where you already know most of your password, but need assistance in trying different possible combinations. The reactions seem positive, but we have not inspected the source code. Use at your own risk (disconnected computer?). It supports a large majority of the Bitcoin wallets:

Armory
Bitcoin Core (Bitcoin-Qt)
MultiBit Classic
Electrum
Most wallets based on bitcoinj, including Hive for OS X
mSIGNA (CoinVault)
Blockchain
pywallet –dumpwallet of Bitcoin Core wallets
Bitcoin Wallet for Android encrypted backups
KnC Wallet for Android encrypted backup

Download link: https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover
Tutorial: https://github.com/gurnec/btcrecover/blob/master/TUTORIAL.md

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Case is a multi-sig hardware bitcoin wallet made in the US. Their official website is http://choosecase.com/ beware there are some impostor sites out there trying to steal your bitcoins. The wallet aims to improve usability compared to the mobile bitcoin wallets, particularly the number of steps. The Case wallet has only three steps:

detects and reads the QR code
the screen shows you the amount and address
asking you to swipe your finger to confirm the transaction.

It take less time than swiping a credit card in the real world but for some online payments you would need to generate the QR code in case only the bitcoin address is shown.

The wallet is a 2-of-3 multi-sig wallet meaning you need 2 keys of 3 to initate a transaction. A good article on multisig is here. Multisig improves the security of the bitcoin system overall. A bitcoin private key is a very large number, which is impossible to guess because computers are very slow to try all of them. A private key is usually a 256-bit number, that’s 2^256 (~ 10^77). Some newer wallets may have numbers as large as 2*2²⁵⁶. One of the keys is embedded in the device. The second key is stored server-side, and is used if the fingerprint scan that was send with the swipe is a match. Fingerprints or biometrics are by no means an ideal security measure, as a security expert put it “Your fingerprint isn’t a secret; you leave it everywhere you touch”. Probably the device would have your fingerprints on them, but we think server-side there are some additional security measures. There’s always a trade-off between convenience and security, this seems reasonable. In case you lose the wallet, there is a third key (2-of-3 Multisig).

The device doesn’t piggy back off your phone for Internet access. It has a dedicated GSM chip and a multi-IMSI embedded SIM card that allows us to hop from carrier to carrier without roaming fees. That means you can carry the device around and make transactions anywhere near a telephone network.

A screenshot of the device internals was posted by the authors of the device: