BitShares Forum

Main => Technical Support => Topic started by: mike623317 on October 19, 2015, 05:33:18 am

Title: Can you change the brain key?
Post by: mike623317 on October 19, 2015, 05:33:18 am

Just wondering if it is possible to change the brain key phrase?

Thanks
M

Title: Re: Can you change the brain key?
Post by: xeroc on October 19, 2015, 08:21:31 am

nop .. the brain key is used to derive your private key ..
you could in theory pick a brain key and get new accounts from that .. but since people are bad (and I mean really bad) at picking words at random .. you shouldn't dare trying ..

Title: Re: Can you change the brain key?
Post by: karnal on October 19, 2015, 10:00:51 am

Quote from: xeroc on October 19, 2015, 08:21:31 am

nop .. the brain key is used to derive your private key ..
you could in theory pick a brain key and get new accounts from that .. but since people are bad (and I mean really bad) at picking words at random .. you shouldn't dare trying ..

Assuming words don't have to be selected from a predetermined list ..

$ cat genbrainkey

Code: [Select]

#!/usr/bin/env bash

x=0
brainkey=""

while [ $x -lt 16 ]; do
  brainkey="$brainkey $(openssl rand -hex 4)"
  ((x++))
done

echo $brainkey

$ ./genbrainkey
75664cdb 309e2720 1a0aa305 1bf5aa3a 2990bbf1 b3004cf5 48dfe16e da454d88 ef7e1fd6 4398ddb2 ad7a4ef6 31c38e92 7a9ffa4a ca1610ae 2a227a6d 5e38c405

Title: Re: Can you change the brain key?
Post by: mike623317 on October 19, 2015, 11:50:13 am

Thanks for the replies, appreciate it.

One quick follow up. I've been trying to figure out how to do a paper backup of my new wallet since BM mentioned on a mumble that it can be done. Any idea how to do this, I don't seem to see where I can do this.

Thanks

Title: Re: Can you change the brain key?
Post by: xeroc on October 19, 2015, 12:44:30 pm

If you know how to use the javascript console, you can dump the private key for any of your public keys (permissions: owner/active/memo) by doing

Code: [Select]

WalletDb.getPrivateKey(PublicKey.fromPublicKeyString("BTS...")).toWif()


Title: Re: Can you change the brain key?
Post by: mike623317 on October 19, 2015, 12:51:53 pm

OK, so the paper backup is just a print out of the public and private keys for an account.

Title: Re: Can you change the brain key?
Post by: xeroc on October 19, 2015, 01:52:50 pm

Quote from: mike623317 on October 19, 2015, 12:51:53 pm

OK, so the paper backup is just a print out of the public and private keys for an account.

phrased the aother way round: with those private keys you can access the account (owner) and it's funds (active)