mmgen-wallet/doc/MMGenLinuxInstall.md

MMGen = Multi-Mode GENerator

a Bitcoin cold storage solution for the command line

Download/Install on Debian/Ubuntu Linux:

Perform the following steps on both your online and offline computers:

Install the pip Python installer:

    $ sudo apt-get install python-pip

Install required Python modules:

    $ sudo pip install ecdsa scrypt pycrypto bitcoin-python

Install MMGen:

    $ git clone https://github.com/mmgen/mmgen.git
    $ cd mmgen; sudo ./setup.py install

Install vanitygen (optional but recommended):

    $ git clone https://github.com/samr7/vanitygen.git
    (build and put the 'keyconv' executable in your path)

At this point you can begin trying out MMgen, creating a test wallet and generating keys as described in Using MMGen below. To be able to track addresses and create and sign transactions, however, you'll need to have bitcoin daemons installed on your online and offline machines.

Bitcoind installation

The bitcoin daemon on the offline machine is used solely for signing transactions and is therefore run without a blockchain. The version bundled with the prebuilt Bitcoin-QT is just fine for this purpose. It can be obtained here:

    https://bitcoin.org/en/download

After installation, locate the bitcoind executable and start it up:

    $ bitcoind -daemon -maxconnections=0

Note that in the absence of a blockchain the daemon starts very quickly and uses practically no CPU once running. Thus a low-powered computer such as a netbook can serve quite nicely as an offline signing machine.

On the online machine, the bitcoin daemon is used for tracking addresses and requires a full, updated blockchain. For this a more powerful computer is needed, especially when importing addresses. Plenty of free disk space is also required to accomodate the rapidly-growing blockchain (20GB in size at the time of writing).

The standard bitcoin daemon at present lacks the watch-only address support we need, so we must get and compile the special watch-only enabled version created by Bitcoin core developer Pieter Wuille, aka sipa. If you have the necessary dependencies installed, this process is surprisingly painless.

    $ curl -O https://codeload.github.com/sipa/bitcoin/zip/watchonly
    $ unzip watchonly
    $ cd bitcoin-watchonly
    $ ./autogen.sh
    $ ./configure
    $ make -j4
    (You may have to install the libboost-all-dev package for the build to succeed)

With your online machine connected to the Internet, start the freshly compiled daemon and let it synchronize the blockchain, taking care to move any existing wallet.dat out of harm's way beforehand. The daemon will create a new wallet upon startup, which you'll use as your tracking wallet.

Congratulations! Your MMGen installation is now complete.