Offline? I thought you still have to input the entire keys online in order to calculate the check sum? Is that correct?

Reply to this note

Please Login to reply.

Discussion

Great question—Thanks for asking! Yes, make your key offline for security, and no, you don’t need to be online to do it. I differentiate between the key and the seed phrase.

You make your 128 (or 256) bit private key manually and completely offline. You will need to touch a computer to #bitcoin (make receive addresses, sign transactions), and at that point you can make a checksum. Why do you need a checksum? Primarily to prevent mistyping the key’s seed phrase, and it’s an input for HD wallets. As you are already entering your key into a computer by that point, checksum is just part of the process.

The good news is you can do all of this offline by severing the internet from your calculations—there are a number of tools for this.

TL;DR is anything you do beyond key generation requires a computer