Introduction

It is no surprise that the first question that BTC holders have when researching forks and airdrops is "How do I get my value?". The answer comes with a lot complexity and it requires the use of a number of tools and doing further research. For example, finding buyers for the coins (if you wish to sell them). Also, once you start working through the process you may discover that just staying organized about what value you have and haven't moved can be a very complex task.

There are tools and services have emerged, but we have found them unsatisfying when it comes to:

• A) Protecting your sovereign rights to holding your own property
• B) Your rights to privacy of your economic matters
• C) Your concerns for computer security when it comes to bringing your cold storage private keys onto an internet-connected PC

We saw a great need for assistive tools that were closer to par with some of the best practices in the space, so we got to work writing such a set of tools.

Tool Overview

Forkdrop Suite is written for the target platform TAILS which is a security and privacy-oriented Linux system and a temporary live-boot environment. TAILS is secure by default in that it operates without writing anything to disk and it will not connect to the internet without going through Tor. This makes it an excellent platform for performing the task of organizing your specific info for claiming, handling of your private keys and broadcasting your transactions.

If used to its full capability Forkdrop Suite automates the task of finding your coins and providing a list of instructions for claiming them with the bitcoin_fork_claimer tool. It will also assist you in the task of remembering which coins you have claimed. It also incorporates our up-to-date coin metadata from Forkdrop.io and warns you if there are potential problems with P2SH or P2WPKH addresses that might impede your claiming. It also points out potential value we know of but maybe unclaimable at present, but may be in the future as projects and tools develop.

This part of the process only requires providing your public address to the tool and the initial set of queries only go to blockchain.info via their .onion access point. This means this part can be done without yet exposing your cold storage private keys to the OS or any tools. The output of the tool and the save file which records claimed coins is intended to be stored on an encrypted USB drive or SD card between sessions.

After this initial preparation Forkdrop Suite performs, the next task is preparing your cold storage and finding addresses you wish to send the coin to (e.g. exchange deposit addresses). The generated report provides you with unique strings for each destination address and each WIF-format private key as placeholders to search-and-replace when you are ready to expose your private keys in order to claim.

The instructions provided by the script include the adaptation of the use of the bitcoin_fork_claimer script to submit the transactions via Tor in order to not reveal the origin IP.

Sample Output

The specific operation and meaning of the output is covered in other articles. However, to give you an idea if given address 1MrpoVBweTnwPTase83S13LSZZ2Ga4Amk7, the suite can generate the detailed report linked here.

This breaks down the coins credited to this address as derived from blockchain.info and the forkdrop.io metadata. It gives you the unique string 1MrpoVBweTnwPTase83S13LSZZ2Ga4Amk7-private-key which you can search-and-replace with the appropriate private key when you are ready to use the instructions. Additionally, it gives you the unique string bitcoinx-destination-address to search-and-replace when you have decided where to send it and you are ready to do so.

Keeping Track of Your Claiming

As you can see in the sample report, for every line that provides the command to create and broadcast the transaction, it also provides you with another line to mark the corresponding coins as claimed. This updates the save file, given as a parameter, to remember that this output has been claimed.

The save file is also given as an input for subsequent generation of the report, where these coins will be reported as claimed. For example, if we marked a bunch claimed for 1MrpoVBweTnwPTase83S13LSZZ2Ga4Amk7, the regeneration of the report would look like here.

Other detailed guides show you how to set up an encrypted drive and use this tool with that file stored on it, such that you can maintain it across TAILS boot sessions and keep your information private.

Other Features

Forkdrop Suite also has the limited capabilities of directly querying some coins networks over Tor to provide more tailored claiming instructions for those coins. This is required for obtaining specific instructions for coins with a separate blockchain such as Bitcoin Private (BTCP) and BitCore (BTX). This method is also able to fined coins which have been moved onto address after the snapshot point.

The drawback of these methods is that they are reliant on less-reliable services provided by the specific projects that are likely to not be as robust as blockchain.info. Also to accomplish this over Tor requires using a Tor exit node which is less private than the .onion access point that blockchain.info provides.

Forkdrop Suite also provides an address conversion tool to help translate between fork coin address formats on your offline system.

These tools will hopefully grow in scope over time to add additional helpful functionality. We welcome feedback, issues, feature requests and open source contributions at our Github page.

Privacy Commitment

This tool packages the forkdrop.io metadata in the repository, so it can be used without querying any of our services. This is our design intention to avoid touching any of your private data. Additionally, by-default the claim-prep.py script only transmits your public addresses to blockchain.info queries at their .onion access point in order to assemble its output.

Other scripts packages do interact with the coin networks and block explorers and do transmit your public addresses, however only through Tor.

Our tools are provided as open-source under the MIT license and do not handle your private keys in any way. However, our instructions are pointing you to Ymgve's bitcoin_fork_claimer tool which does handle your private keys. However, it is open source and written to a standard of quality in primary service of the interests of users.

By nature of these high-quality tools for enabling you to move these coins anonymously and securely, there is a natural impediment for us to be able to monetize our efforts in a way which lower-quality tools and services are more readily able to. We ask that you do consider making a donation to this effort to help us maintain this high standard. You can even donate some of your fork coins that are difficult to sell.

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