Post
Topic
Board Project Development
Merits 4 from 1 user
Re: Turn photos into Bitcoin wallets
by
o_e_l_e_o
on 16/04/2022, 18:05:37 UTC
⭐ Merited by NeuroticFish (4)
How is this better than just taking a picture of 12 seed words, and storing that on the cloud? It would be trivially easy to hash all hacked data to check if it returns a balance. At least a picture of 12 actual words will have some captcha qualities.
It's security through obscurity, which is not a great way to store your seed phrase or anything sensitive, but if someone was to break in to a cloud storage account with say 10 GB of data on it, then a hash of a few photos in a specific order will take an attacker much longer to figure out (unless they know exactly what they are looking for) than a .txt file with a seed phrase in it. If your privacy is top notch and an attacker has absolutely no idea you are involved in bitcoin at all and just happens to break in to your account, then they probably won't waste their time trying this method since the hit rate would be so low.

But, even with all that considered, I would still never do this for all the reasons I listed above. There is far too much that can very easily go wrong for the very small additional security it brings. Far better to write down your seed phrase on paper. If you want to store your seed phrase electronically, then far better to encrypt it with a strong encryption key than to come up with some crazy encoding scheme involving hashing specific pictures in a specific order.

I mean, some people may remember photos much better than seed words i believe, and everyone and his own capabilities and all, like memory is flexible and different from one person to the other.
But seed phrases are not supposed to be remembered. Swapping from remembering 12 words to remembering x number of pictures in a specific order and the algorithm you used to turn them in to a wallet is no better.