Paper wallet

[vantuz-subhuman]

@DaCooz

So after thinking about it. I could actually uninstall Daedalus from my computer right now as I have already made two copies of the 12 word phrase. Then if I do decide to delegate I could just reinstall Daedalus and use the 12 word phrase and all would be good? This way it has no shot at being hacked lol

Exactly. Your ADA is not stored in Daedalus - it’s stored on the blockchain. The “Daedalus wallet management program” is just a tool that allows you to:

1. Create new wallets and obtain 12 secret words
2. Import (restore) already existing wallet, using 12 secret words
3. View your “wallet balance”, once you have a wallet
4. Create and send transactions, signed by your secret key, to spend ADA
5. [future] Delegate stored ADA to pools

The “problem” here is that when you withdraw your coins from an exchange - your send them to a specific address. Once you have sent some ADA to an address - that address has a balance. A “wallet” may consist of multiple addresses, and each of these addresses may have it’s own balance, so the “wallet balance” is the sum of all the balances of it’s addresses. So when you send coins to someone, or yourself from an exchange - you don’t send them to a “wallet” - you send them to an “address” that’s owned by a specific “wallet”.

Only Daedalus (for now) may show you the total balance of a “wallet”, cuz you need to have the secret key to know, which addresses are owned by this wallet. But you don’t have to know a secret key to be able to watch the balance of a single address, and that’s why “explorers” exist:

1. https://cardanoexplorer.com/
2. https://adatracker.com/

(I like the second one more, but the first one is official.)

Each of them have a list of latest transaction on the main page, for example. So your can click on any of them and to see, how much ADA was send, from which address[es] and to which address[es]. There’s also a search field where you can put any address and it will show you it’s balance.

When you create your wallet for the first time in Daedalus - it contains only one address that you can see on the “Receive” tab. There’re two ways for the wallet to get new addresses:

1. You may manually ask for new receiving address on the “Receive” tab. This will generate new address with zero balance, but that address will also be owned by your wallet, so you can give it to someone to send you money, and they won’t be able to check your previous balance (cuz they have no way to know that this particular address is related in any way to your first address. Only you, as the owner of the wallet can know that those addresses are related. Unless you send ADA, and it has to use both addresses cuz there’s not enough coins on any one of them - in that case people will be able to see that addresses are actually related).

2. When you send some ADA to someone, and there’s some change - Daedalus will automatically create new address and send the change there. Address will also be owned by you in the same way. For now there’s no way to change this behaviour, but there’s some hope:

How about a read-only wallet; think Monero's "view key"

Not sure if such feature would be easy (or possible in current architecture) to implement. But for starters it would be nice (and fairly easy) to allow to configure Daedalus to not create new address on each outgoing transaction. Then Daedalus would send money back to the same address from where initial output was taken. In that case Martin could give Bob the main address of his wallet and Bob could monitor it thru standard explorer. It’s not the same, as it would require Martin to maintain th…

So… if you have a wallet where you don’t spend ADA, but only accumulate it - then this wallet has only one address, and there’s basically no difference at all between watching your balance in the Daedalus, or watching the balance of this address on explorer website. And you don’t actually need Daedalus, since you don’t create any transactions that would require your secret key. So having it installed and with this wallet in it is actually a pointless possible point of failure that gives no advantages over not having it

Once there’s staking available - then yes, you just have to once restore your wallet in the Daedalus, then delegate all your coins, and then remove wallet again and forget about it.