[Ethereum] Parity – export private key for cold storage

parityparity-walletprivate-key

I'm trying to store some Eth I have in Parity into cold storage. Since I have no guarantee that Parity will continue being supported several years/decades in the future, or that the seed passphrase and/or key encryption algorithms won't change, I want my cold storage backup to also include my account's unencrypted private key, so that I can load that into any Ethereum wallet being used at the time and have access to my funds, without having to rely on potentially obsolete software.

Looking for this functionality in Parity, all I could find so far is the Export feature, which doesn't seem to include any keys, encrypted or otherwise, and the keystore located at \AppData\Roaming\Parity\Ethereum\keys\ethereum, which is encrypted from what I understand. How do I get my private key decrypted?

Best Answer

It's actually a feature not to expose unencrypted keys. People would use it for simple backups without understanding the implications.

Just use ethkey generate random from your command line which is included with Parity:

secret:  42821fbb3b5110b0a5642313105dc9d7e521700ae26b702e10c248afa8486d0e
public:  cd455f9f4083b481f37fb96160505c77cb4f5cfe7759f29badf14489c35d44d62c2c9c6042aab23b2355fed36e632e652df8833ce5687a11b961af9495cb0355
address: d7ff0af0315c46e9ffb45513a5d69ab486754df7

And put it on ice. :)

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