Silk Road forums
Discussion => Security => Topic started by: greenlove on November 19, 2012, 04:03 am
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Hi,
I've been trying to get Bitcoin wallet and TOR onto a bootable version of linux for a while now. I have found versions of linux that will run Bitcoin wallet but will not run TOR and visa versa, but I am yet to find one that will run both.
Does anyone know a version of Linux that can run Bitcoin wallet and TOR without having to download a bunch of installer packs etc to get it running?
Thanks a ton!
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There's a Linux version of Bitcoin-QTavailable on bitcoin.org. It works on Tails and I'd imagine it would work on pretty much any Linux OS.
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2.7 GB seems a lot to download over Tor, it would take ages and unnecessarily waste a lot of Tor bandwidth.
You could download the blockchain over clearnet and then copy it into your Tails/Liberte/whatever installation, and then set up your anonymous wallet. That way you'd only have to download the latest few blocks over Tor.
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Yep, this was one of the reasons I quit using my own bitcoin wallet, and began trusting cloud spots like instawallet, or, in my case, TradeHill ...and then I"d use either liberte linux if I needed persistence, or Tails if I didn't ... used SwissDisk for stashing stuff...book luck, interesting problem, if liberte doesn't work....
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Yep, this was one of the reasons I quit using my own bitcoin wallet, and began trusting cloud spots like instawallet, or, in my case, TradeHill ...and then I"d use either liberte linux if I needed persistence, or Tails if I didn't ... used SwissDisk for stashing stuff...book luck, interesting problem, if liberte doesn't work....
Okay, so I spoke too soon. Bitcoin-QT does NOT work on Tails, as you said. I ran it before I set up persistence and figured I could just import my wallet and the blockchain to /.bitcoin, but /.bitcoin lies outside the "persistent" directory. (This seems like it would be a trivially easy problem to solve by the way, but I couldn't find any solutions on the forums; somebody named v1adimir wrote a work-around, but it was so amazing that he had to host it offsite and the link is now dead. Not sure I'd trust him anyway.)
So Liberte does work if you wanna use your own Bitcoin wallet? With which client?
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Bitcoin - QT or otherwise - doesn't run on any Debian systems, of which Tails is one. I looked into it a while ag and there's nothing which'll run a bitcoin client on Tails. It should work on other Linux distros - know it works on Ubuntu - but you'll just need to get that distro into a bootable USB format.
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I ran it before I set up persistence and figured I could just import my wallet and the blockchain to /.bitcoin, but /.bitcoin lies outside the "persistent" directory. (This seems like it would be a trivially easy problem to solve by the way
bitcoin-qt has the -datadir option which lets you specify the location of the data directory. So, start it with
bitoin-qt -datadir=/path/to/bitcoinDataDir
See if that works.
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Okay, so I spoke too soon. Bitcoin-QT does NOT work on Tails, as you said. I ran it before I set up persistence and figured I could just import my wallet and the blockchain to /.bitcoin, but /.bitcoin lies outside the "persistent" directory. (This seems like it would be a trivially easy problem to solve by the way, but I couldn't find any solutions on the forums; somebody named v1adimir wrote a work-around, but it was so amazing that he had to host it offsite and the link is now dead. Not sure I'd trust him anyway.)
So Liberte does work if you wanna use your own Bitcoin wallet? With which client?
No, the persistence was handy, but I had other little hassles with liberte, but only bitcoin wallet I used were the online ones...that's why I switched to them in the first place, best I can remember, was because I could get the wallet setup on liberte...but I'm totally comfortable with instawallet, so I actually prefer Tails, and just keep stuff in cloud...mostly just bookmarks...boot up Tails, download bookmarks, and I'm in business...handy to have lastpass, or have keepass and dowload a file, which is what I used to do...I also tried and used privatix, as it had some pretty cool stuff on it. But anyway, as far as btc wallet goes, when I quit using windows for this stuff, I pretty much was tired of the wallet too...good luck! :)
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I ran it before I set up persistence and figured I could just import my wallet and the blockchain to /.bitcoin, but /.bitcoin lies outside the "persistent" directory. (This seems like it would be a trivially easy problem to solve by the way
bitcoin-qt has the -datadir option which lets you specify the location of the data directory. So, start it with
bitoin-qt -datadir=/path/to/bitcoinDataDir
See if that works.
Hey, thanks! I gave this a shot despite knowing next to nothing about Linux.
So whenever I tried anything beginning with bitcoin-qt in the command line, I got an error reading:
bash: bitcoin-qt: command not found
I figured out that this meant I had to create a path to bitcoin-qt, but I couldn't figure out how to do that in Tails. So I googled around some more until I discovered the ./ command and ended up using this:
./Persistent/bitcoin-qt/bin/32/bitcoin-qt datadir=/home/amensia/Persistent/bitcoin-qt/bin/32/btcdata
When I use this command, Bitcoin runs, but I also get an error in the Terminal that says:
sendto: Operation not permitted
When I run the same command while disconnected from the Internet, I get an error that reads:
sendto: Network is unreachable
So it runs, but it won't connect to the network in either case. Encouragingly, a random receiving address is generated, and the /.bitcoin directory is not created under /amnesia- which is what you'd want. It also manages to "remember" the receiving address after being closed and run again from the command line- also good.
Less encouragingly, it doesn't seem to actually be using the directory I specified (home/amensia/Persistent/bitcoin-qt/bin/32/btcdata); nothing ever appears in that directory. In fact, when I change that path to random gibberish, it doesn't seem to make any difference- the receiving address even remains the same, despite the fact that no wallet.dat file can be found anywhere on the computer. Weird.
On the other hand, when I run Bitcoin by simply double-clicking on the icon, everything is as it was before: it generates a new receiving address, creates wallet.dat and other files in the /.bitcoin directory under /amnesia (files that will be wiped out when Tails is shut down), and successfully connects to the network. It run just fine, but it's all running from memory, so the problem is still that there's not enough room for the blockchain, whether I download it or swap it in from somewhere else.
If you made it this far and have any other suggestions, I'd be happy to try them out. This is kinda fun in a mildly frustrating way. ;)
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I have tails and am thinking about using instawallet.
Pretty noob question buy if I did that, how would I backup the links onto another thumb drive? Is the only option to send myself a PGP message via email with the links in it?
Thanks.
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Create a persistent volume on tails, save your instawallet links to a gedit file, or open office, whatever.
Either just use the links from there or transfer from the tails usb to another usb while in tails.
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You could always setup Whonix. It's a new 2-VM Tor Distro that allows you to automatically torrify any OS by forcing it through the Whonix Gateway VM. I am running it currently with an electrum wallet on Debian Wheazy.
Bitcoin - QT or otherwise - doesn't run on any Debian systems, of which Tails is one. I looked into it a while ag and there's nothing which'll run a bitcoin client on Tails. It should work on other Linux distros - know it works on Ubuntu - but you'll just need to get that distro into a bootable USB format.
Um... Bitcoin-QT literally just unpacks and runs in Debian, don't know where you heard otherwise. Tails is a specific version of Debian, don't make broad assumptions based on just one distro. Tails is an amnesic OS (hence project amnesia) that is designed to be read-only with an OPTION for persistence, by default it is not available. Regular Debian distro's support electrum, armory, Satoshi, multibit, etc for Bitcoin clients.
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Create a persistent volume on tails, save your instawallet links to a gedit file, or open office, whatever.
Either just use the links from there or transfer from the tails usb to another usb while in tails.
Fantastic. Thanks.