Source: https://twitter.com/aantonop/status/603701870482300928 : The methods discussed in this article are not recommended for short or long term storage of your Bitcoin. This is only for fun. Anything you do with this knowledge or the provided library is at your own risk. As long as you understand that, let’s begin. Disclaimer Brief history: Back in May of 2015 that utilized to embed a signed transaction into the image. This idea of concealing and easily decoding arbitrary data in other data intrigued me. Andreas Antonopoulos posted the above picture steganography So I started thinking, how can we play with this idea? Can we use the file to store our Bitcoin private key? Heck, why not use the file itself as our seed for generating a mnemonic phrase? With this, I coded up a quick proof-of-concept and uploaded a here simple demo here. Our Goal: Take the image from Andreas’ tweet and turn it into the following Bitcoin address, “ ”. bc1q57euh23y3qs2f9d5mtwpax5lqecfvrdkqce82a Why would we do this? Turning an image into a Bitcoin address effectively allows us to turn any seemingly arbitrary file into an inconspicuous, mobile unit of wealth. Now, instead of writing down a series of 12–24 words to recover and access funds all we need to do is carry around a photo on a thumb or hard drive. We can even add a passphrase to prevent malicious actors from gaining access to our funds if they somehow attempt to brute-force our photo library. The Process In A Nutshell: Bitcoin = ( ); bip39 = ( ); bip32 = ( ); kittenphoto.jpg; Data URI: data:[ <data>;
//Hash the base64 data of the kitten photo
const hash = Bitcoin.crypto.sha256(<data>);
//Use the hash to create a mnemonic phrase
const mnemonic = bip39.entropyToMnemonic(hash);
//Add a passphrase (Optional, but recommended)
const passphrase = ""
//Use the mnemonic and passphrase to generate the seed
const seed = bip39.mnemonicToSeed(mnemonic, passphrase);
//Use the seed to generate a bech32 address
const root = bip32.fromSeed(seed, network);
const keyPair = root.derivePath(`m/84'/0'/0'/0/0`);
const address = Bitcoin.payments.p2wpkh({pubkey: keyPair.publicKey}).address;
//Result
address === "bc1q57euh23y3qs2f9d5mtwpax5lqecfvrdkqce82a"; /*
Bitimage Pseudocode
*/ //We'll need the following libraries const require 'bitcoinjs-lib' const require 'bip39' const require 'bip32' //Grab the kitten photo //Get Data URI of kittenphoto.jpg ][;base64], < > media type Every file can be broken down, defined and represented as a . Bitimage extracts the Base64 string from the of any file that you feed it and uses that string to generate a mnemonic phrase. Base64 string data URI The Base64 string for the kitten image is rather long so I’ve shortened it for presentation purposes here, “/9j/4AAQSkZJRg …. +MbzXZF3n/2Q==”. Since the Base64 string is rather unwieldy we hash it using the SHA256 hash function leaving us with the following, “1808d35318ac7cb98b69ff9779b699d6a631f15e0b353ac89b7c4020774832ed”. We then pass this hash off to BIP39’s “ ” function to generate our mnemonic phrase. With the mnemonic phrase in hand we can generate our seed with or without a passphrase. Including a passphrase will prevent any random person with access to the file from accessing our funds, assuming the passphrase is sufficient and cannot be easily brute-forced. entropyToMnemonic Using this seed we can now generate our keyPair and corresponding addresses/private keys for the uploaded file using the library. As expected, we are left with the following Bitcoin address, “ ”. bitcoinjs-lib bc1q57euh23y3qs2f9d5mtwpax5lqecfvrdkqce82a Fun & Games: The mnemonic for the kitten photo without a passphrase contains roughly 0.00095133 BTC. Feel free to claim it if you manage to sweep the keys in time. As a challenge, I have also sent 0.01 BTC to the following address, This address was generated using the kitten image along with a BIP39 passphrase. If you manage to claim it, congrats! “bc1qcyrndzgy036f6ax370g8zyvlw86ulawgt0246r”. Bitimage Demo Site: Again, feel free to take a look at the demo site or run it locally on your computer by cloning the repo on Github . here here In Part 2 we will discuss how to use the methods discussed here to timestamp our documents and prove their existence at a certain point in time without utilizing any centralized third party. Have any questions? Feel free to reach out: Github: https://github.com/coreyphillips Twitter: coreylphillips @

Twitter

Read My Stories

Too Long; Didn't Read

Download free Tech Leaders Productivity Report!

Part 1/3: Can You Turn Your Photos Into Bitcoin Private Keys/Addresses? Hell Yeah !!

About Author

Comments

TOPICS

THIS ARTICLE WAS FEATURED IN

Related Stories

Untitled Story

How to Hide Your Private Keys with Colors

How to Keep Your Seed Phrase Safe?

How “Predictive Text” Functionality can Reproduce Mnemonic Crypto Wallet Phrases

06/09/2018: Biggest Stories in the Cryptosphere

06/02/2018: Biggest Stories in the Cryptosphere

How to Hide Your Private Keys with Colors

How to Keep Your Seed Phrase Safe?

How “Predictive Text” Functionality can Reproduce Mnemonic Crypto Wallet Phrases

06/09/2018: Biggest Stories in the Cryptosphere

06/02/2018: Biggest Stories in the Cryptosphere

Light-Mode

Classic

Newspaper

Dark-Mode

Neon Noir

Minty

HN StartUps