🔐 Learn how to create a seed phrase by hand in under 10 minutes! Penlock's solution is easy, fast, well-researched, and secure:
○ Works with any wallet
○ Video and illustrated guides available
○ No reliance on third-party tools or websites (OMG please don't do that 🫣!!)
○ Close to maximum entropy: paper tiles have a 1–2% bias, better than basic dice (5–10%) and coins (10–20%)
Printable components + written guide: 🔗 https://v1.penlock.io/generate
Available in 🇬🇧 English and 🇰🇷 Korean (auto-detected). Please DM me on Nostr if you'd like to help with additional translations.
📣 Feel free to share widely and across networks — the tool is MIT licensed, and the video is public domain (CC0)!
~O#j@Iy_F:36hd£3CUm7?+4$2}434v&y?weidMfgt0hT%y7ofe46Ry{7(wK7uM÷/#b9*8
I just mustered up this passphrase in KeePass entropy calculator and it's 310 bits
Obviously this is quite excessive but a solid 13th word can be useful (and disastrous if forgotten 🥺😭)
I always assumed the whole reason we are using seed phrases was specifically to avoid this kind of things. :)
And you generate this and store it offline right?
When you wrote it down you can still read your own handwriting and can tell a I from a l from a 1 right?
Lol for some reason a leading password manager presents 0&O as O&O wtf 😒 horrendous oversight 😭😭
As a clarification, my bias figures are rough estimates of the worst-case scenario for coins, dice, and tiles under good shuffles/throws. Someone correctly pointed out that not every coin or die will be as bad; but it's also easy to underestimate biases because it's generally twice what you'd intuitively expect. (e.g., a 52/48 coin has a 4% bias and generates only ~96 bits of entropy over 100 throws.)
The reason tiles (and cards alike) have a much better safety profile is simple: low-quality coins/dice can be severely imbalanced, while the quality of a deck of tiles/cards has much less impact on the randomness of the draw. Moreover, the elements of a given deck are much easier to audit than the balance of a given coin or die.
Now, to be clear, even a 20% bias would still result in an unbreakable 12-word seed phrase. You'd still have 102.4 bits of entropy, plus 11 additional bits of security from BIP39 key stretching. But my goal with Penlock was to identify and deliver the method that best combines UX and security, and I believe paper tiles are it.
There's bias correction techniques. The simple version of which is:
The more technical and in depth version of which is:
https://wuille.net/posts/binomial-randomness-extractors/
https://btcmaxis.com/article.html?id=7554e7cb-d8aa-45d5-95c8-adea8d87ea23 ↩
Yes absolutely, Von Neumann debiasing, which entirely nullifies first order bias. It kinda takes forever, though I believe you can go faster with a die doing: 1 if every other throw is higher, 0 if every other throw is lower, discard if they are equal. (I think Codex32 uses that from the top of my head)
It's a very good solution if you have the patience, probably closer to optimal than using tiles, but I was looking for the best solution that would be fast & simple. Btw, I'm curious, how do you compute your checksum if you go for 24 words?