Dedicated to Entropy users and my friends and family that I gave paper wallets to.
A couple days ago I was requested from my grandmother to help her with a task. It involved me taking a look at these paper wallets that I gave her 5 years before to see how much was on them and if I could cash it out for her. In this piece I will be sharing exactly what I did to help her with that.
For starters, these paper wallets were from a Mycelium Entropy which is a USB device that you can plug into a USB port on a printer and print out a cold storage paper wallet. If you are interested in learning more about those devices you can read more here. An interesting feature of this Entropy device was that it allowed you to cut up the private key (a necessary key for ownership of bitcoin) into 3 parts making it harder for theft, and in order for you to spend them you needed 2 of 3 to reconstruct the private key.
After receiving the paper wallets I went ahead and used the latest Android version of Mycelium and surprisingly it didn’t work. The process is incredibly simple, what you do is you scan the two QR codes labeled Private Key Share 1,2 or 3 and the screen is suppose to bring you to the amount that is on the paper wallet but instead it took me back to the home page where you see the total amount of bitcoin in the app*. Immediately I jumped to the web and ended up finding a website which can be accessed here that allows you to reconstruct the private key by typing in the individual characters of the two shares and then spits out your private key.
This work above was done on my desktop computer so after getting the private key I sent it via Signal Desktop as a “Note to Self” to then have it on my phone. From there I copied it to my clipboard and went under the Cold Storage settings and chose the clipboard setting. I then sent all of the funds to one of the addresses in my wallet so that I would have access to all of them. In no time the funds were sent and I had extracted the funds from what appeared to be a defunct feature. I have not yet brought it up to developers yet but wanted to write this out in case someone else is experiencing this same issue or is a close friend or family member of mine and has received a set of these paper wallets from me. With the price of bitcoin being in the 30k it would be nice to have the option to choose if you want to keep them or not. So here is the hopefully simplified idea of how to extract the funds out.
*At the time of this writing which was Nov 20th, 2020 the app didn’t work with the scanning the QR codes to obtain the private key. If it still doesn’t work then this would be the method necessary to extract the private key.