Armory Backup - My Experience with Wallet Recovery Services

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The Defunct Armory Wallet

Recently I was going through my Bitcoin paper backups (courtesy of Armory), and I decided that it was time to transfer my crowd-sale Maidsafecoins from my paper backup to Omniwallet.

It’s been about a year since I last used Bitcoin core, and so first I had to re-download the bitcoin blockchain. This took me about 2-3 days and a total of 75GB of disk space and bandwidth (oh my how the blockchain size increased)!

Once I had the bitcoin core synced up, I finally installed Armory. I had a few problems getting Armory and Bitcoin-qt (or bitcoind) to talk to one another, but I finally got them working.

After letting Armory do it’s thing for a couple of hours, I came back to it stating that it was “organizing the blockchain”. A quick internet search turns up that this is a common slow point, but I decided to restart it anyway.

I let Armory go for a night, but when I came back, it was still on the “Organizing Blockchain” step. A bit more research turns up that there is a ton of drama going on with the Armory project right now.

tl;dr Armory is unsupported and may not work

My Experience with Wallet Recovery Services

So now at this point I have my paper backup, and the private keys for all of my Bitcoins, but I have no idea what the public key is and Armory refuses to scan the transaction history. Do you know how frustrating that is?

I’ve tried everything from resetting Armory, to reinstalling it, to downloading the community maintained version. I have even tried copying the blockchain to my Windows machine, but to no avail.

Finally, I decided to seek outside help. I contacted Dave Bitcoin at Wallet Recovery Services after doing some research to see if it was legit or not. Ultimately I took a leap of faith and decided to trust him with my recovery keys.

He was willing to communicate using PGP encryption, and was able to get me the key I needed to import my old wallet. Anyway, this is my trustworthiness +1 for Dave Bitcoin.

Conclusion

If you have any Bitcoins or Maidsafecoins stored in an Armory wallet, now would be a good time to move them to another wallet, because I don’t know how long Armory will remain functional.

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I thought if you imported the private key into omniwallet it gave you the public key automatically

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It does, but even in offline mode, Armory needs the public key to create a transaction (or export the private key).

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I guess then you could just import your private key(s) into omniwallet.org and get your public key or move your coins, or just check they are OK

Remember the coins are on the blockchain. THe wallet doesn’t actually store any coins, just the keys and ledger. Using your private key(s) any wallet can access your BTC coins and an omni-protocol aware wallet can access your MAID

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Seems like you paid for services you could get free of charge.
As @neo pointed out earlier wallets don’t matter once you own (have access) to private keys.
The only positive conclusion from your experience for the community is that Wallet Recovery Services is trustworthy business :grin:

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God I hate armory. It worked alright early on, but last couple of years has been terrible. I used it to store offline Btc and I honestly think I have re-synced the whole database about 10 times… Which takes an eternity and requires several restarts and yeah…

Hardware wallets are the future imo