Hardware wallet recovery seed words

TreasureHunter

TreasureHunter

Well-Known Member
Hello,

Do you know of any hard wallet that allows you to set your own seed words (backup phrases)?

'cause most of 'em just generate them by themselves, which might as well be the biggest scam, since their own system can generate (and remember) their own passwords. So the manufacturer/hacker can later simply get in and grab the coins.

The entire self-generating system is very stupid. It is not a good idea that the wallet "generates" the backup phrases by itself. They could simply have a mere few dozen words available and they could just rotate them and attribute them to their users. Later, the wallet manufacturer could simply use the right combination of words and hack ALL wallets and steal ALL coins from them.

For now, the old rudimentary QT software wallets (which take ages to update) seem to be the most trustworthy.


Another question would be: are these seed/backup phrases cross-wallet compatible?

Like: if you use Trezor can you recover your coins through a different, let's say: Ledger wallet?


If my questions are naive, then it's because I am still learning about crypto :D

Thanks in advance for any useful advice!
 
if youre worried about hackers, generate on an airgapped pc not attached to the internet, always best practice when generating private keys.

usually no, seed phrases are specific to wallet makers.
 
dozerz said:
if youre worried about hackers, generate on an airgapped pc not attached to the internet, always best practice when generating private keys.

usually no, seed phrases are specific to wallet makers.
Click to expand...

OK, so if a Ledger hard walled breaks, then the contents can be recovered through Atomic (soft wallet) or Trezor (hard wallet) or others - with the keyphrases provided.

I am only worried because I see (so far) ALL hardware wallets generate their own keyphrases.
Normally, I'd be able to come up with the most unusual, weird, multilingual keyphrases.
 
All hardware wallets are bip39 compliant, it uses a specific word list to generate seed phrases. You can't make your own from the list because the last word somehow does a validity check, no different to how merchants can check whether credit card numbers are valid. If you want to add your own words, generate your seedphrase and put a password of any length afterwards
 
^
Actually besides BIP39 there is BIP 44 (and who knows what else). Gosh, this entire thing is so complicated and the information available is so cluttered. Still learning about crypto :D

Meanwhile I came across this useful video - truly useful (only found it now BY ACCIDENT), but it's good:

 
I still wonder: is there a mechanism to hinder people from having the same keyphrases?

I bet tens of thousands of nasty "grinches" are working on keyphrase-cracking (and generating software) to try out and test millions of combinations. Couldn't they guess them?

They did the same for email passwords, credit card numbers etc. What could hinder them?
 
You're misunderstanding words as passwords. The seed words combinations are actually bits. And every private key is a 256 long string of zeroes and ones. Which means your odds of breaking a private key with actual coins in the addresses are 2^256. Basically mathematically impossible that someone would brute force a private key to spend someone elses' coins. Which is why people phish instead of spend money on ASICS trying to break people's private keys.
 
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