The payment has already been registered by the website and we can proceed to download the wallet file.

The file, ethereum-wallet-xxx.json is encoded in a popular format called JSON.

It’s not formatted for humans, but if we pretty it up a little it looks better:

It contains a few values, encseed, bkp, ethaddr, btcaddr, and email. I haven’t taken the time to read up on the format, but I assume that encseed is encrypted seed (private key) of our Ethereum wallet. It’s probably encrypted with the password we used in the registration form.

Encrypting the wallet

This is where the more technical part starts. I’m sure there are other ways of doing this, but by using tried and trusted unix command-line tools, we can be confident that the backups can be restored no matter how much time passes.

If you’re on OSX or Linux, the command line tools will already be installed on your system. If you’re on Windows, like me, we’ll be using cygwin, which lets us run linux programs.

You might want to ask a friend who knows Linux to help you with the steps. It’s not necessary to reveal the passwords to your friend at any step.

Open a terminal/cygwin window and change the current directory to where you downloaded the wallet:

$ cd /cygdrive/c/users/Andreas/Downloads/

Verify that the wallet file is present:

$ ls ether*

ethereum-wallet-bd08e0cddec097db7901ea819a3d1fd9de8951a2.json

As you can see, the wallet is named ethereum-wallet-bd0…json on my system. We’ll rename it to ether.json to make things a little shorter:

$ mv ether* ether.json

And confirm that the file was renamed:

$ ls -lh ether.json

-rwxrwx—-+ 1 Andreas None 1.5K Jul 24 16:24 ether.json

I use the command ls -lh to see the file size as well as the name. We see that my file is called ether.json and is 1.5K bytes (1500 bytes).

First, we’ll encrypt the file with the des3 algorithm. At this point you must invent a very strong password. I’ll be using the password phrase correct horse battery staple without spaces, correcthorsebatterystaple. I’ll refer to this password as the paper password, as opposed to the wallet password from the registration form.

Encrypt the ether.json file with DES3 and store it in ether.json.des3:

$ cat ether.json | openssl des3 > ether.json.des3

enter des-ede3-cbc encryption password:

Verifying — enter des-ede3-cbc encryption password:

Let’s look at the des3 encrypted version:

The file is now in binary and cannot easily be displayed in our terminal or printed on paper. The square looking characters are the ones that have no visual representation.

This makes printing the encrypted wallet a problem.