Post
Topic
Board Wallet software
Merits 1 from 1 user
Re: Securing Your Seed Phrase with Washers
by
TheCoinGrabber
on 16/03/2022, 14:19:43 UTC
⭐ Merited by n0nce (1)
You could encode it if you really wanted too, but depending on your threat model could potentially be overkill. However, to answer your question if someone got their hands on the washers it contains the seed, so they would be able to use it just like anyone else. This basically protects against losing the seeds though various natural threats, for example fires, flooding to degradation of materials. Steel washers are decent at surviving most things, maybe not very high temperatures, but it really does depend on how you store them, hence the container suggested.

Although, if you've got into this much effort, it's probably safe to assume you also have at least some physical security in place to prevent prying eyes. The security labels are a good idea, but effectively if the container has been opened, and therefore the stickers have been torn, you can safely assume that its already been compromised. It's more of a warning that it has been compromised, that something that'll help you save it, if you get what I mean. It doesn't necessarily safeguard your seed.

I strongly, strongly advise against it. There's a saying that goes something like 'don't roll your own crypto'. There are various posts about it online. In the context of Bitcoin seed backups it's not really because of security concerns, but more about doubts in people's ability to remember what they did one, two or 10 years ago to their seed. Something that seems trivial now (e.g. 'I swap every 4th word with every 5th word' or something), might be completely forgotten mere months later.

I recently ran into an issue where I knew I had a secondary wallet inside a hardware wallet, but couldn't remember how to access it. I knew it wasn't through passphrase and the software didn't show me a second wallet either. It turned out through trial and error, that that wallet used derivation paths to create multiple wallets (without using the standard passphrase feature) and I had completely forgotten about it. It was solved by 'creating' a new secondary wallet in the software (this information is stored on the PC and I had gotten a new one) and the funds were back. But you might not be so lucky with a stack of washers that you applied some random custom 'crypto' to multiple years ago.

Thank you for the responses, decided against encoding the passphrase. I'm not even decent with cryptography (sometimes I do "encrypt" texts with tools like cryptii) and considering my history with passwords, I might indeed be unable to decode it properly. Once I do get large enough funds I'd follow the steps in this thread, maybe cover it "starlite" as well.