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Topic
Board Electrum
Re: Electrum: Urgent question on seed phrase and pass phrase
by
ranochigo
on 20/07/2021, 03:36:12 UTC
That wasn't a recommendation, merely an observation.  Generally I agree with you, however there are ways to safely and securely create a Bip39 seed phrase on an offline machine that can be used with Electrum or a hardware wallet.  Many here have warned about using Ian Coleman's Bip39 tool, siting the concern that a browser doesn't provide enough entropy.  However, the Bip39 tool does provide the option of entering your own entropy, and /dev/urandom can be used create a HEX string with the desired entropy.

Please correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see that as any less secure than allowing a hardware wallet to generate a seed.
I never really recommend people to generate seeds outside of their hardware wallets. If you're using a hardware wallet, the seeds should be generated within the hardware wallet which is a completely isolated environment with little risks of it getting compromised. Most people are often unable to properly create a truly isolated and sanitized environment and that makes this a pretty bad idea.

If you are thinking of creating your own seed outside of your hardware wallet, then you might be better off not spending a hundred bucks on a hardware wallet and instead just use an air-gapped wallet. Having a seed generated on an offline computer pretty much guarantees that the seed is only as secure as how you've generated the seed in the first place.