How To Make a Bitcoin Address With a TI-89 Calculator

sarahnaomi writes: The power of Bitcoin is giving your dusty old TI-89 calculator a second chance of being useful. Matt Whitlock, who helped make one of the world's first Bitcoin ATMs, is at it again. In a video posted on to Vimeo, he showed how using the calculator once only used for high school geometry and a 12-sided die makes a secure address for your Bitcoin account. The video self-explanatory. Load up your calculator with the code, roll it 72 times and enter the number rolled into it. After that, the calculator pumps out a private key and address.

Comments

Are you retarded?

[rebelwarlock]

I'm not rolling a die 72 times and manually entering each result.

Re:Are you retarded?

[itzly]

Or take a picture of your room, calculate a hash, and be done with it.

Re:Are you retarded?

[ultranova]

It's a bitcon article so asking if the suckers drawn in the scheme are retarded is considered rude.

More importantly, calling people who use Bitcoin retarded or suckers doesn't actually constitute a strong argument against it.

only not backed by anything of value

Bitcoin is backed by the goods and services available in exchange of it, just like any other currency.

and it's founder has gone into hiding.

The founders of most currencies currently at use are dead.

Not many devices

[DrYak]

In theory, your "you mama" joke approach should work. (For a good enough hash. Things like SHA2 or SHA3/Keccak should be okay).

But, in practice, that would require:
- a device with a camera (well, duh...)
- a device that is easy programmable enough (because very few camera are known to automatically display a has on the screen by default)
- a device that is *offline* (the whole point of doing it on something different than a laptop is to do it on a device that has low risk of virus/trojan/backdoor)

That strongly limits the possibilities:
- TFA's Ti 89 doesn't have a camera
- point-and-shoot camera usually don't have an easy way to install your "picture hashing your mom as a random number generator" system
- smartphone aren't offline and could be susceptible to hacking, the exact thing you wanted to avoid by going to a portable device.

Appart from a few old-school PDAs (e.g.: a Palm IIIc, with the PalmPix dongle), few devices will qualify all of the above.

Re:Not many devices

[Reaper9889]

Well, that was one of the more unexpected "you mama" joke: Your mama is so fat that she shows up in a post mentioning only your room!

I want to note that just in case someone thinks so: You can not roll two 6-sided die and add them together and get a 12-sided dice - first of all you cant roll 1 and you roll 7 way too often. What you can do is have two rolls of a 6-sided die. Say you first roll x and then y. If y is even you rolled x otherwise you rolled 6+x. This gives you precisely 12 different equally likely outcomes.

Re:Not many devices

[itzly]

- point-and-shoot camera usually don't have an easy way to install your "picture hashing your mom as a random number generator" system

Take SD card from regular digital camera (or phone), stick it in an off-line linux laptop, and run sha256sum. No programming required.

Re:Not many devices

[itzly]

In theory, your "you mama" joke approach should work

No, yo momma is too big for a hash.

You accidentally some words

[wonkey_monkey]

The video self-explanatory.

Ah.

Load up your calculator with the code, roll it 72 times

Okay, done that, but nothing much happened. What is the 12-sided die for?