Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Can we choose our own seed words?
by
o_e_l_e_o
on 04/08/2023, 16:47:15 UTC
-snip-
I've spoken before about why commiting seed phrases to memory is a terrible idea, so I'll quote myself below:

Each year:

69 million traumatic brain injuries: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29701556/
12 million strokes: https://www.world-stroke.org/assets/downloads/WSO_Global_Stroke_Fact_Sheet.pdf
10 million new diagnoses of dementia: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/dementia
5 million new diagnoses of epilepsy: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/epilepsy
2.5 million cases of meningitis: https://www.path.org/articles/toward-world-without-meningitis/
2 million new brain tumors: https://academic.oup.com/noa/article/3/1/vdaa178/6043315
1.5 million cases of encephalitis: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0163445322002110

That's each year, and that's only major conditions which directly affect the brain. Add in things like cardiac arrest, heart disease, sepsis, shock, diabetes, vascular injury, hemorrhage, poisoning, smoke inhalation, etc., all of which can cause secondary brain injury, and there are literally hundreds of millions of people every single year who suffer some form of insult to their brain which can lead to memory problems.

Do you want to trust all your coins to those odds? I know I don't.

There is a very good reason every good wallet tells you to write down your seed phrase. Relying on your memory is a recipe for disaster.