Keeping Forkdrop Suite TAILS Claiming Work Organized on an Encrypted SD or USB Drive.

Introduction

Forkdrop Suite is a set of tools to help you with the task of claiming fork coins and is intended to be run on TAILS. We have showed you how to set up the live-boot system and download Forkdrop Suite:

For secure record keeping, we also showed you how to set up an encrypted USB or SD card for use on TAILS between temporary live boot sessions:

This article will suggest a scheme for using your encrypted drive with Forkdrop Suite on TAILS.

Setup Folders

For this guide, we are using an encrypted drive named claiming_files which have mounted using the GUI file browser. This drive is mounted at /media/amnesia/claiming_files/ on TAILS's Linux filesystem.

TAILS empty drive

On this drive, via the right-click menu or Shift-Ctrl-N hotkey, we can create a new folders via the New Folder dialog:

TAILS create folders

We have chosen alice_claim and bob_claim as a hypothetical example of two different customer claim tasks with their own assigned folder. Files associated with that particular concern can stay inside that folder.

Setup Save File

If you run the claim-prep.py command from the Terminal in the forkdrop_suite/ directory (covered in the previous article) giving it the -h flag by typing:

./claim-prep.py -h

It will show you the usage documentation for the script:

TAILS claimer prep usage

This as you can read in the text, script takes claim_save_file as a required parameter and it suggests you give a path that is on an external drive and in a subfolder.

To run with the script with the address for Alice 1MrpoVBweTnwPTase83S13LSZZ2Ga4Amk7, the line to give is:

./claim-prep.py /media/amnesia/claiming_files/alice_claim/alice_save 1MrpoVBweTnwPTase83S13LSZZ2Ga4Amk7

Running the command will produce this output:

TAILS claimer prep run Alice

Which notifies you that the file /media/amnesia/claiming_files/alice_claim/alice_save has been created and written (also, the report file is generated, but that is covered in another article).

If you follow the instructions in the report to run bitcoin_fork_claimer, you can mark a particular fork coin output claimed by running the mark-claimed.py script line that it gives you like so:

TAILS mark-claimed

Running this command will update the alice_save file to mark that the corresponding coins are claimed.

TAILS mark-claimed.py run

Re-generating the report by specifying the claim file will generate the report as if the corresponding coins are claimed and categorized them as such to focus on the remaining unclaimed coins.

Likewise, if you are working on Bob's claims with a different set of addresses, using a separate file in the other directory such as /media/amnesia/claiming_files/bob_claims/bob_save can track the state of those claims there.

After creating the save file, the Forkdrop Suite tools will only create and update. It will not perform any destructive actions on this save file. All actions it takes are printed in the console output from running the tool. The format of the file is also straightforward, basic JSON and can be manually updated with a text editor rather than by using the mark-claimed.py script if you prefer that or wish to make quicker modification.

Save Copies of the Claim Report

From generating the report in the above screenshots, it gives you a command to save a copy of the output onto your drive. However, you have to specify the actual destination. For Alice the appropriate place might be /media/amnesia/claiming_files/alice_claim/. You can copy the report to a destination by running that command like so:

TAILS copy alice report

Going back to the GUI file browser, the alice_claim directory should have these two files:

TAILS alice claim files