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I have my bitcoins in a hardware wallet(trezor and nano ledger s) and I want to keep it that way, my mnemonic seed is stamped in metal and stored securely, so I won't change it, and I will keep it airgapped. According to bitcoin gold, they have support in three wallets:
Coinomi Guarda Freewallet
As far as i can understand, none of theese wallets have hardware support, and trezor or nano won't support bitcoin gold natively either. What are my options here?
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As far as I can see the answer is that you can't access your BTG without one of:
A BTG app from Trezor/Ledger (note it is possible to write custom apps for the Ledger but it would want to be a LOT of BTG for you to countenance that),
Accessing the private key stored in your hardware wallet.
The second option, while not easy or as safe, would probably be the most economical from a time and effort perspective. The approximate steps to take would be:
Find or write an app that will allow you to enter your mnemonic seed. This could be done on an air gapped PC and you could microwave the harddrive afterwards if do desired,
From the master key you would then need to acquire the specific private key(s) for the transactions you want to spend on the BTG chain,
Construct and sign the transactions for that you want to spend on the BTG chain. And VERY importantly make sure whatever the transactions implement whatever BTG's replay protection mechanism is so that they can't be replayed on the BTC chain.
Copy the signed transactions from your air gapped PC onto a USB drive and broadcast with a BTG node.
Essentially that's a lot of hassle and not without a fair degree of risk. I guess it will all come down to how the value of BTG fares.
Personally I had my BTC stored in my full node wallet at the time of the BTG fork. After that I transferred them back to my hardware wallet. Now once BTG goes live I have the option of copying the wallet.dat into the BTG full node.
Wouldn't it be possible to generate the account private key from the mnemonic seed and import that key to one of the wallets supporting Gold e.g. Coinomi? – Andrzej Pronobis – 2017-11-12T03:44:21.263
1@AndrzejPronobis yes, although if you do that you may as well find a wallet that allows restoring a wallet from the mnemonic seed and avoid the hassle of trying to extract individual keys. The problem with that approach as far as the original question goes is that the hardware wallet is now "compromised" in that the seed has been used on an internet connected system. – sipwiz – 2017-11-12T03:55:24.560
Trezor/Ledger does have third-party app support, that allows you to sign transactions using your hardware wallet, but never expose the private keys. Everything happens off-computer. – Kristoffer Nolgren – 2017-11-12T09:08:00.773
@KristofferNolgren for BTG? Which app is that? – sipwiz – 2017-11-12T09:24:20.693
not for btg, but in general. – Kristoffer Nolgren – 2017-11-12T17:13:07.217
@sipwiz Is putting a private key for one account to an online wallet compromising the whole hardware wallet (seed)? – Andrzej Pronobis – 2017-11-12T18:11:23.780
@AndrzejPronobis entering one private key online won't compromise your seed, it will potentially compromise any BTC attached to the public key. But the problem is finding and extracting the required private key(s) from a BIP-0032 wallet. It's not a trivial task. – sipwiz – 2017-11-12T20:14:55.783
@sipwiz Thanks for the explanation. There is a lot of open source code that could be used to extract the account private key from the seed. But, as you suggested in your answer that would have to be done on air gapped PC, potentially with HDD fried afterwards. – Andrzej Pronobis – 2017-11-12T23:25:47.030
Here is how you can get the private keys using your seed words: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/53506/3267
You have to move your bitcoins, provide the seed to another wallet, extract and transfer your BTG, and then move your bitcoins back into a fresh hardware wallet with a new seed. You'll have to stamp a new metal card. – Chloe – 2018-01-11T23:17:36.180