Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Where to store your keys?
by
witcher_sense
on 10/11/2021, 09:28:30 UTC
I have one related question on seed phrases. We know that seed phrases can be used to access wallets compatible with BIP32 protocol. What if in the long distant future there will be no wallet supporting BIP32? Does it mean all my coins will be lost?

BIP32 is not a protocol but a standard or set of instructions that describes one of the ways of how to generate many and many private keys deterministically from a single random number. BIP39 describes how to write down this single random number in a human-readable format. The random number you generated (in most cases it will be a set of 12 or 24 English words) and then put in a safe place is the only thing that gets you full access to your funds. Even if we abandon these standards of deterministic generation (derivation), which I highly doubt by the way, you won't lose access to your funds in case you have your seed phrase. Even if all wallets stop supporting these standards, there will always be other means to generate private keys from your seed phrase. For instance, https://iancoleman.io/bip39/