What do you mean by "regenerate"? A wallet (if not used to referring to the software to manage one) is just "the funds under control of this private key".
What I described is the complete procedure for regenerating a wallet set, from zero. If you want a real-world equivalent, it's like teleporting all the gold you own to your hand at any time. You might think the procedure is a hassle, but the reality is that you will have a well-secured computer as your primary storage. Being able to recreate a safe store out of thin air is just icing on the cake.
Hardware wallets come with a passphrase mnemonic that completely restores them. Write it down, put it in a safe deposit box, you're done. You can then take an acetylene torch to your hardware wallet, buy a new one, restore from the passphrase, and have everything back. Hardware wallets are far easier to back up offsite than key management on a computer, though a SmartCard-HSM comes close. (Hardware wallets are the same principle as an HSM.)
Since you're probably wondering, the passphrase mnemonic on my Ledger is a group of 24 words that represent a translation of the primary secret key. All accounts on my Ledger are derived from it. I've tested wiping and restoring, and the passphrase now lives in my bank deposit box.
By the nature of cryptocurrency, if you had all the public keys from your hardware wallet you could use it as a bank by dropping the wallet itself in a safe deposit box. You don't need it in your physical possession to receive, only send. I'm considering buying a second for exactly this purpose, though at that point, a paper wallet would be just as functional.
Since the wallet file is a set of private keys... they're basically the same thing. You're recreating the wallet if you're restoring the private keys from a stored copy.
Well, you can rotate any wallet, if you're willing to pay: just create a new wallet, pay the transaction fee and transfer your money over to the new address.
It's kinda like with full disk encryption, you can change the key-encrypting-key in seconds, but to rotate master key would require a long time to re-encrypt everything.
generating a new wallet for every transaction is a bit wasteful, you can however just create a new payment address, and watch for payments on that.
if you create a few hundred receiving addresses, then you can keep the wallet (and hence private key) offline, as all transactions are public, and minimise the risk of having funds stolen (as we've seen a lot of places lately getting hacked and having their accounts drained..)
Yeah, but even a local wallet isn't local. You could write down or memorize the private key and manipulate the funds from a new wallet client on a different machine.
Roughly, a wallet is a public/private key pair. You use the public key to receive money, and the private key to send money. If anyone hacks your private key, they can take all your money.
Yes, handling private keys is very inconvenient. I also can’t imagine my mother (although rather tech-savy for her age) handling all her financials with crypto wallets.
However, one of the next Ethereum upgrades (ERC-4337) will make it possible to safely recover wallets without a key seed phrase. Its implications seems to be huge but I am not deep enough into it to explain how exactly it is going to work. Perhaps somebody more competent than me can elaborate on that.
ehm, no. you can create brand new wallet for each transaction and wallet on its own is not connected to your real identity in any way. it's more like government's worst nightmare.
reply