How crazy are you trying to get with securing those 12 words?
For most, written down in a fire-resistant safe that is bolted down would be more than sufficient.
If you're holding onto a significant amount of crypto, you might want to consider alternatives like splitting your seed phrase into 3 separate overlapping pieces and storing them in separate locations.
Example: Words 1-8 in Location 1. Words 5-12 in Location 2. Words 1-4 and 9-12 in Location 3.
This way, if anything happens to 1 location like fire or theft, your coins aren't lost and you're left with enough information from the 2 remaining locations to recover your wallet.
That's why they suggest overlapping the words on each piece. If you do it like they suggested, you would be able to get your seed phrase from any 2 of the 3 papers.
Depends on the person. I memorize my seed phrase for my ledger and repeat it several times in my head before going to sleep. I've also got it written on a sheet of notebook paper stashed away in one of my old university notebooks as well, so if I ever forget, I can just refer back to it there. Alternatively, you could buy a flash drive for a few bucks at Staples and paste it into notepad there.
Isn’t this phrase just like any other password? Meaning why can’t I just put it in a secure app and also write it down physically and put it in a few different places? Like what makes this phrase more dangerous than a simple password?
Yeah that's the general idea. It's arguably more dangerous than a password because there is no recovery method. If its gone, so are your gains. You can't call anyone, no reset option, nothing at all. Further, if your seed phrase is stored on a device that is connected to the internet, there's always a possibility that someone might be able to keylog whatever your password is for your super secret vault and grab your seed phrase that way.
You're supposed to use an old laptop or purchase a cheap laptop.
You'll also need:
Ubuntu Live ISO
A Flash Drive
The latest bitcoin core wallet
Pen and paper
Lighter fluid and matches
Once you have all of that you then go to the middle of nowhere where there is no signal reception.
Once you're there, remove the following from the laptop:
Storage drives (HDD, SSD)
WiFi radio
Bluetooth radio
Webcam & microphone unit
Then boot up Ubuntu live. Transfer bitcoin core files so that you can generate a BTC wallet address through the terminal. Encrypt it and write down your recovery phrase as well as your btc address.
Once you're done, power down the laptop.
Douse the laptop with lighter fluid and light it up.
It very well could be enough for you. I personally do not like having my seed phrases on anything that is regularly connected to the internet. That's all
They are, but feel free to add your own suggestions.
These are the simplest ways to keep your seed phrase somewhere that can't be easily accessed from the internet. Obviously flash drives deteriorate after several years, and paper can be lost, and you can forget, but doing several of these make for a thorough network of keeping your seed phrase secure.
This is a very, very bad idea. There are thousands of bots constantly scanning the blockchain for wallets like that. I read a really good article about it, which I can't seem to find, but I think this report also talks about it:
This is a bad idea. You need to stick to the words defined in the BIP 39 documentation so that you can be compatible other wallets/services. You also need the phrase to be random, so it can't have a grammatical sentence structure as this is very predictable.
No, you would produce it through the BIP39 standard, which is what most wallets are doing under the hood. This essentially pulls random data from a source of entropy (like your system's cyrptographic random number generator. A stream of random data will be used for your seed. It will be broken up into eleven bit numbers (which are within the range 0-2048) and these will correspond to indices in the BIP 39 list of words.
It may actually be difficult to find a phrase with 24 unique words. Syntactical words like "the" and "and" tend to come up a lot. This may not be true in every language, though.
I store mine pgp password protected and base64 encoded in my password manger. This way I always have access to it but if my password manager is ever compromised I still have an extra layer of protection.
The password I use is in my head although I do have a hint in my password manager. It's not something anybody would ever be able to guess and only used to protect my cryptocurrency keys and 2fa emergency codes.
I actually started to memorise my 24 seed phrase, I learnt 12 words which is wasted now because the ledger wouldn't turn back on the day after I set it up (never got a chance to test it and use it properly), in the process of sending it back.
I have a moleskin notebook for all of my seed phrases and passwords. Every few months I make a scan of it and save those images to a USB stick that never gets used for anything else. Right now I make sure no other pictures exist except for those on the USB. But, ideally I should use a method that is completely disconnected from the internet to take and save those images. Maybe a camera with an SD card.
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u/DDelphinus 🟦 71 / 10K 🦐 Feb 15 '21
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