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0 sats \ 7 replies \ @0xbitcoiner 11h \ parent \ on: Write a short story with 12 words bitcoin
My question’s not about the story, it’s about a real seed phrase situation.
As I said, just open whatever wallet app and create a new wallet seed. An empty wallet just for this test.
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Maybe I should just make a post about my question. Someone might know!
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If you use random words and some of them are not from that words list, you may end up in having an invalid wallet seed.
NEVER start a new wallet seed with words that YOU choose. The probability that somebody else use them too is higher the the entropy of a wallet app.
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I agree with sticking to the list, but technically, only the first 4 (?) letters matter. So you could make your own list of words, as long as each word has the same first 4 (?) letters as the official list.
But no reason to do that. Also, some wallets might have unexpected side effects on how they parse your words.
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can you go into more detail about the first four letters thing?
Is it possible to use a custom word list to generate Bitcoin seed phrases? #1261029
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I stand corrected. You can't use your own words, even if they share the same 4 first letters. @optimism's answer seems much better informed.
The first 4 letters identify the word (no word in the list shares the same 4 letters), but the mapping to binary will break if you use another word.
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You could make an algo that takes
identifier = left(word,4)
and then locate(identifier)
in an index of real words, but that's additional software, and it doesn't add any real security, except perhaps buy you 5 more minutes for someone that stole your seed phrase to figure it out and then manually map it against the standard.If those few extra minutes are significant in your security setup, you may need to rethink your setup.
Most of these change BIP39 "ideas" aren't worth the effort. If you're not rich, your main enemy is loss. If you're rich, your main enemy is centralization. Neither will be solved by encoding tricks.
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