Virtual Currency: The BitCoin Guide by Lachlan Roy

Author:Lachlan Roy
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Reference
Published: 2011-12-25T16:00:00+00:00

Mac OS X

If you’re using OS X 10.6 or 10.7 (Snow Leopard or Lion), you’ll need to install a free system utility called MacFUSE first that provides the software necessary to create VEDs using TrueCrypt. It uses a standard .pkg installation process, so you shouldn’t run into any problems at all. When that’s installed, we can get started properly.

Create a Virtual Encrypted Disk (VED) using TrueCrypt. Just use all the default settings, enter a secure password and save it in your DropBox folder. You’ll want to allocate around 100MB to the VED to make sure that you don’t run out of room down the line.

After creating the VED, mount it using TrueCrypt. This will mount a volume which looks just like when you mount a .dmg file to install an application. By default this will be called NO NAME – right click this in the Finder sidebar and rename it to something a bit more intuitive, such as BITCOIN (FAT, the file system used by the VED requires the name to be in capital letters).

Before doing anything to the BitCoin files, open up BitCoin and take note of your receiving address. We can use this to verify whether the symbolic link has worked correctly.

By default, the files needed by the BitCoin client are stored in the following location:

~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin

The ~ means your home folder, not the root Library folder – these are two different folders which contain different data. Make sure you look in the right one! When you find it, copy the entire BitCoin folder to the VED and then delete the folder in Application Support. You’ll probably want to copy it to your Desktop as a failsafe in case something goes wrong, too.

Now it’s time to create a symbolic link to trick OS X into thinking that the folder is still there in Application Support,even though it’s now in the VED. To do this,we’ll need to start up a Terminal window, and enter in the following:

ln -s /Volumes/BITCOIN/Bitcoin ~/Library/Application Support/Bitcoin

Where BITCOIN is the name you gave to the VED when it’s mounted.

That’s the last step! Now you can start up the BitCoin client and it will take its data from the VED. Make sure you mount the VED before starting the BitCoin client, though – if you start the client without mounting the VED, it will create a new Bitcoin folder in Application Support and remove the symbolic link. If this happens, just delete the folder in Application Support, mount the VED and create the symbolic link again using the same command.

Now we can start up the BitCoin client and check to see whether we have the same receiving address as the one we started with. If so, it’s all done and working great.

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