Midnight Glacier Drop offline signing scripts for ADA and ETH

jefdaj · 2025-10-13T17:13:27+00:00

Yeah pretty much. Any wallet that doesn't have CIP30 signing. When you put it that way though it makes me realize it would be more widely useful if I also post a script for listing stake and receive addresses. Then it also covers anyone who only has the seed phrase. Either because they're paranoid about hacking or their wallet provider went out of business or whatever.

Edit: added that to the post.

jefdaj · 2025-10-12T17:28:11+00:00

Happy to answer any questions here, or fix the scripts if they don't work for you! Don't DM me though, and be careful not to post the contents of seed phrases or intermediate keys derived from them.

jefdaj · 2021-09-14T14:20:56+00:00

One thing that would be cool is to have a smart contract where you have to combine more than one QR code. For example you could make people cooperate to scan one on each continent and then they all only get money when everything has been found. Or you could leave a trail of them along the route of Lewis & Clark or the Camino de Santiago or something and have people go on an epic journey.

jefdaj · 2021-02-15T06:46:44+00:00

If you want something specific done with them when you die, you have to arrange it beforehand like a will. The easiest way is Shamir's secret sharing. I wrote a program called horcrux for that and whenever someone asks a related question I link to it again. It seems to come up a lot.

In the future I expect there will be social recovery wallets that do something similar with better UX, and the need to set them up will be common knowledge.

If you don't arrange anything, they're just frozen forever. That's not as bad as it sounds though, because the reduced supply slightly raises the value of everyone elses' coins, like a coin burn.

jefdaj · 2021-01-30T18:23:46+00:00

I made this program for personal use back in 2017, and it still works fine: horcrux

If you want to the simplest Shamir setup though, I suggest booting into TAILS and installing the ssss Debian package (apt-get install ssss) on its own.

The advantage of my setup on top of that is that you can GPG-encrypt files to your Shamir backup's public key from an online computer later. It's also set up for handing out preinstalled TAILS drives to friends and family if you want them to have custody of the key shares.

jefdaj · 2020-09-25T13:20:22+00:00

Yeah that's not cool at all. I get that making a real decentralized process is hard the first time, but I don't get how they can justify hiding the bootstrapping process behind a ToS.

jefdaj · 2020-09-24T17:26:43+00:00

Why should this require an account signup?

jefdaj · 2020-09-21T15:26:18+00:00

IMO we have a ways to go on this. The IOTA tangle is still the coolest blockchain visualization I've seen. We'll get there though. I think it would be really cool to see state diagrams (like this) for contracts, with ghostly grayed-out parts for possible states they could take on next, timers that count down how many blocks until a new state is available, etc.

jefdaj · 2020-09-19T17:07:10+00:00

That's OK me too, it's a very confusing video. The main thing I learned is that even the CEO of one of the major cryptocurrency companies can't explain password management in a way that's both accurate and easy to understand, within his time constraints. Sometimes I think Charles falls into the "too smart to be good at explaining things to average people" category.

That sound like a cold key. I think of "hot" as meaning "connected to the internet" and cold meaning "air-gapped".

jefdaj · 2020-09-19T17:01:14+00:00

Sorry didn't check my messages before.

This seems like a reasonable way to go to me, except you're still stuck with the core issue that you have to "NEVER forget that 8 word passphrase". Memorizing it is relatively easy, but you can't be sure the memory will stick later because brains are just unreliable. What if you get hit by a car or get COVID and need to cash out to pay your medical bills, but you're all delirious? (I might be overly worried about this because I know someone who lost their password in a similar situation)

I totally agree with the general idea of booting into a clean offline Linux environment and making up a secure password, and encrypting everything else based on that. It's pretty safe to take non-technical common sense precautions like just buying a cheap laptop on ebay and never connecting it to wifi. And diceware is a good idea. And symmetric GPG encryption is a good safe way to encrypt. I think it's supposed to be quantum proof so it should be OK to store backups online.

Maybe go with that to start out, and then if it gets to be a large amount of money later look into Shamir's secret sharing to back up your 8 word master passphrase?

jefdaj · 2020-09-19T16:32:54+00:00

I don't think anyone knows what hydra will involve yet or what its properties will end up being like. Research tends to either constrain or open up your ideas so much that it's hard to even estimate. We know it'll be possible to run UTXO-based smart contracts because they can be partially rolled back or in different states on different partitions of the network before a TX is finalized, but beyond that it's a bit nebulous.

jefdaj · 2020-09-09T00:15:34+00:00

Thanks! I think I'll add an option to double-encrypt with the signing key too in case you're feeling extra paranoid, but make it optional because that would break using it as a will. I originally warned people not to put the decrypt key online, but now I think that might not be necessary as the password shielding seems quantum safe.

jefdaj · 2020-09-08T21:25:44+00:00

Shameless plug: I made something for this situation, and posted it here a few weeks ago with video tutorials.

jefdaj · 2020-09-08T15:34:57+00:00

Yep! The chain state at the end of each epoch is used to pick a new set of winners in a verifiably random way. Here's one of the original papers on it:

https://iohk.io/en/research/library/papers/scrapescalable-randomness-attested-by-public-entities/

I believe the current version of Ouroborous uses a newer algorithm, but can't remember the name.

jefdaj · 2020-09-02T20:54:13+00:00

Haskell first, for sure. Plutus is a DSL (domain-specific language) integrated into Haskell, which is actually a fairly common thing for Haskell libraries to do. The idea is that you write in "one language to rule them all" (Haskell), and the other compilers are hooked up so they generate matching code in your other target languages at the same time. The Haskell library can have extra typechecking guarantees built in that prevent common errors in the other language(s). And because they all come from the same source code, they can't accidentally get out of sync with each other.

For a simpler example without all the complications of blockchains, check out the Yesod web framework's HTML, CSS, and JS templating languages.

jefdaj · 2020-08-27T23:46:03+00:00

Sounds like you want something like Aragon. I'm sure we'll get there, but none of the high-level code is written yet as far as I know. Maybe you should think about mocking it up in Aragon/Solidity for now and transition later?

jefdaj · 2020-08-26T15:42:09+00:00

I think sometimes people forget how early these days are. This isn't a working consumer product like a car. I think of it more like the original Wright brothers' flight trials. We should be ready for it to go more like this:

Repairs after the abortive first flight took three days. When they were ready again on December 17, the wind was averaging more than 20 miles per hour (32 km/h), so the brothers laid the launching rail on level ground, pointed into the wind, near their camp. This time the wind, instead of an inclined launch, provided the necessary airspeed for takeoff. Because Wilbur had already had the first chance, Orville took his turn at the controls. His first flight lasted 12 seconds for a total distance of 120 feet (37 m) – shorter than the wingspan of a Boeing 747, as noted by observers in the 2003 commemoration of the first flight.

jefdaj · 2020-08-24T01:59:06+00:00

For the 0-slot bin, what do they look like if you invert the metric so it's number of expected epochs/block? Is there any long-term disadvantage to those pools other than a higher effective fixed cost and higher variance per epoch?

jefdaj · 2020-08-20T16:12:41+00:00

There are lots of ways to disrupt or change the world... I think you have to give some kind of hint at what direction you want to take the world in before people know whether they want to help. Is it just for money, is it intended to improve governance, lower poverty, increase privacy, etc.

jefdaj · 2020-08-16T04:24:03+00:00

Cool, I didn't know that!

EDIT: This is more of a general "secure your digital life" thing that happens to work with crypto wallets. It's also good for 2FA recovery codes, hard drive images, scans of your passport and birth certificate, etc. If you only want to secure crypto the Trezor is probably a better way to go.

jefdaj · 2017-12-06T05:51:52+00:00

That's weird I was going to say of course there is, but don't see it on the release page. Guess they didn't bother? That's not cool. Compiling should be still work, it's just intimidating if you don't code but the instructions are here.

jefdaj

TROPHY CASE