How to Store a Seed Phrase in an Apartment with Roommates The short answer: to store a seed phrase in an apartment with roommates, assume every roommate, guest, cleaner, and landlord can access anything not locked down, and protect the backup accordingly. No loose paper, no phone photos, no copy in a drawer anyone else…
Is Storing a Seed Phrase in a Password Manager Safe? No. Storing a seed phrase in a password manager is not safe, even if the password manager itself is excellent. A password manager is built to defend login credentials against online attacks, but a seed phrase controls irreversible bearer assets. Once someone copies your twelve…
How to Create a Decoy Wallet with a Passphrase You can create a decoy wallet with a passphrase by adding a second, weaker passphrase to the same seed phrase, moving a small amount of bitcoin into it, and keeping your real savings behind a stronger secret passphrase. If someone forces you to unlock your wallet,…
Best Hiding Spots for a Seed Phrase That Burglars Miss The best hiding spots for a seed phrase that burglars miss are the ones a burglar would never spend time on: sealed inside the casing of an old device you never use, behind a wall panel in a room they will not enter, or buried…
How to Store a Seed Phrase When Traveling Internationally How to store a seed phrase when traveling internationally comes down to one rule: the words should cross borders on paper or metal in your own possession, never in a photo, email, cloud note, or message to yourself. Before you leave, check every device you carry…
Why a hardware wallet? If your bitcoin lives on an exchange or a hot wallet on your phone, it is one hack, one phishing email, or one bankruptcy away from disappearing. A hardware wallet keeps your private keys on a physical device that never exposes them to the internet. You confirm every transaction on the…
Why buy bitcoin without KYC? Every time you buy bitcoin on a big exchange, you hand over your ID, your address, and sometimes a selfie. That data lives on someone else’s server forever, and those servers get hacked. Buying without KYC is not about hiding. It is about not creating a honeypot of your personal…
Can a 12-Word Seed Phrase Be Brute Forced? No. A 12-word seed phrase cannot be brute forced with any computer that exists or will exist in any foreseeable future. The phrase carries 128 bits of entropy, which means there are 2^128 possible combinations, a number so large that guessing through it would take far longer…
An iron bar beats any encryption Last weekend in Vendin-le-Vieil, northern France, four armed men kicked in the front door of a family home at 4 a.m. They tied up the couple and their two kids, separated the father, and spent the next two hours beating him until he handed over his account codes and…
You can check if a bitcoin wallet is safe in about five minutes using WalletScrutiny, an independent non-profit that tests whether a wallet’s app actually matches its published source code. If a wallet passes all of their tests, that is a strong trust signal. If it is closed source or custodial, you should know that…
