When developing personal op sec, it’s important to consider the various attack vectors we need to protect ourselves from.
And one of the most uncomfortable concerns is the very real threat of a wrench attack.
It’s hard to imagine what we would do if we were physically threatened for our bitcoin.
But in times like these it certainly doesn’t hurt to have options that could potentially save our wealth and our lives.
One of these potential options is a duress pin.
A duress pin is an alternate pin for your hardware device that will open up a decoy wallet. Leave a believable amount of bitcoin in there and keep most of your funds safe in your primary wallet.
LEDGER
With a Ledger device, you do this by creating a passphrase wallet and assigning it its own PIN. It might make sense here to use the passphrase wallet as your primary wallet and the base wallet as your decoy. Just remember you need the passphrase to recover funds from that wallet.
In the device’s built in menu, go to Settings (select and hold both buttons down), then choose Settings (again), Security, Passphrase. Click right 3 times and Set Up Passphrase. Then Attach
To Pin. It will then guide you through setting a new Pin and Passphrase. When it’s all done, plug in the device again, enter the new PIN to access the new wallet.
COLDCARD
On the ColdCard, go to Settings, PIN Options, Duress Pin. It will prompt you to enter a duress pin. The duress wallet is created deterministically from your seed, so it will recover with your primary wallet when you enter your seed in a new coldcard device. Or it can be recovered in another wallet using your seed and derivation path m/2147431408’/0’/0′.
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Remember to put some funds in there to throw off the crooks, and you’re all set! One more line of defense against the $5 wrench.
