2️⃣ During Setup

🤔 What’s the deal with the “Do you trust this individual?”?

🤔 Does it matter what order I enter shares when restoring?

🤔 How do I make this go faster?

🤔 How reliable is my USB stick?

What’s the deal with the “Do you trust this individual?”?

In short, if you know who they are, know their GPG fingerprint belongs to them and believe they could have reviewed the Bitcoin Core source code and built it, then you can trust their signature. If you don’t trust anyone on the list, ask someone trustworthy who they would trust. Or go back and click “Skip” to let the CipherStick developers choose whose signatures to trust.

Does it matter what order I enter shares when restoring?

No. But currently, you do have to keep your computer on until you’ve reached a threshold. So if you’d have to fetch some by travel or encrypted video calls it makes sense to enter those first so you’re not waiting around with as many shares stored in the computer’s memory. For this reason, the seed backup passphrase is always last.

How do I make this go faster?

  1. Check that your internet bandwidth is not slow. You can’t sync faster than you can download and the blockchain is around 600 GB.
  2. Check that your USB stick has a sequential write speed > your internet speed. It might be on the box or you can look for benchmarks.
  3. If it’s neither of those, check if you had bad luck and connected through an unusually slow onion circuit and disconnect that peer.
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  4. USB stick random read speed should be over 10 MB/s (Check USB Benchmark 4k random read rankings) if your PC has 8GB of RAM or less.
  5. USB capacity should be at least 8 times your system’s RAM to make full use of your memory
  6. Random write speed should be over 10 MB/s if you have 8 GB of RAM or less or a USB stick capacity that is only 2x or 4x your RAM. Sequential read speed helps for rescanning wallets but not IBD.
  7. Avoid restarting Tails and using lots of bandwidth on other devices until it completes.

NOTE: New versions of CipherStick will sync in minutes instead of hours or days thanks to a beta feature called AssumeUTXO. For extra high value transactions you should wait for the background initial block download to sync.

How reliable is my USB stick?

For reliability, it SHOULD be a new USB stick, not a heavily used one, and it SHOULD be kept cool in use and in storage. Having more RAM on the PC and capacity on the USB stick, ideally 16+ GB RAM and 16x more USB stick capacity than RAM helps reduce wear. As well as shutting down the node less often. Further, some “Industrial” SD cards have better temperature and data loss resistance in storage than fast/large consumer USB sticks, these could be better for infrequently updated backups.