Your Bitcoin seed phrase is used to generate your private keys. Your private keys are required to spend your Bitcoin. Thus your seed phrase is your Bitcoin password.
If you’ve played games like Minecraft, you’ve heard of a “seed” before. A seed in Minecraft is used to generate the world. If you use a different seed, a different world is generated, if you use the same seed, the same world is generated.
This is how you are getting your private keys, you must generate your private keys from scratch using your seed phrase. If you lose the seed phrase, you lose the ability to generate your private keys, as no other seed phrase will map to your keys. Once your seed phrase is lost, so are those private keys.
You must keep your seed phrase safe. Metal Seeds specializes in laser engraving grid patterns that allow easy etching of your seed phrase onto the metal.
For example, “The Classic” consists of numbers 1-12 down the side of the plate. Each word of your 12 word phrase would be punched in corresponding to it’s order.
You will need a hammer and a letter punch. These are metal pins with letters on the tips so that when you hammer the pin onto the metal, each letter will be punched onto the metal.
“The Classic” has 2 sides, front and back, that can be used for the following:
- 24 word seed phrase. The front has words 1-12 and the back has words 13-24.
- 12 word seed phrase (one-sided). The front has words 1-12 and the back is empty
- 12 word seed phrase (two-sided). The front has words 1-12 and the back has words 1-12.
Having a one-sided plate allows you ample room for customization and personalization. We offer to engrave custom information onto that back space OR you can use your hammer punch to punch in personal information like passwords, passphrases, etc.
There are many other ways to store your seed phrase but first we must understand where the seed phrase comes from.
When a seed phrase is generated (let’s just work with 12-word phrases), it is generated as 12 11-digit binary numbers. One 11-digit binary number creates a range of 2048 possible integer values. Each of these integer values correspond to an English word in the standardized wordlist (there exists wordlists in other languages).
So, 12 binary numbers are generated, each between 0-2047 which then directly matches their corresponding word in the wordlist. Now you have 12 words that encapsulates your entropy for your keys.
The words are used directly when generating your private keys, not the order number nor the binary version. It’s the English words that are put back-to-back in a long string that is used as the seed to your private key generations.
This means you could
- Save the words (word1, word2,…)
- Save the order of the words in numbers (290, 543, 12, 1011,…)
- Save the order of the words in binary (10011010110,11011011011,…)
- Convert the indices of the words into a standardized numerical QR code
and all of these would still retain your information needed.
Keep in mind that the words are needed for the generation of your wallet. So, when you put your seed phrase into a wallet software, you may need to convert them back to words. Though, this is dependent on the software. For example, QR code seed phrases are saved in number form and compatible wallet software do the conversion themselves. They can do the conversion because the standardized wordlist is public, if you give them the order numbers they can convert it to the words. You can use a non-standardized wordlist, but it becomes risky as no software will be able to help you restore your lost wallet.
The Classic saves the words
Indent – Binary & Binary Web both save the binary indices of the words
More Designs coming soon