I’m about to tell you about a hidden feature of Bitcoin. It’s been hidden in plain sight for years. This feature is mind-blowing and may save your financial life.
I make one promise. When you understand this feature, it will not make you rich, but it will prevent you from becoming poor.
I am going to simplify the technology of a wallet. Your seed phrase converts under the hood to a private key, a random string of 0’s and 1’s where the number of permutations is so vast that the chances of two people stumbling across your private key are as close to zero as possible. It might seem weird that it is just chance that protects your wallet, but it’s far more secure than any bank system of user ids and passwords. It has never been hacked.
Your seed phrase is not a password. It is your wallet. Take a moment to understand that. You can regrow your wallet to the last transaction from that seed.
If someone finds it, they can create a clone of your wallet with your words, and voila, they have all of your bitcoin.
So everyone tells you to write your seed phrase down and store it safely. Sounds good. But for many people not as easy as it sounds. Say you are young, and your employment is precarious. You rent a place but lose your job. Now you are couch surfing. How are you going to keep your seed phrase safe? You can’t carry it with you. Too easy to lose. You don’t get on with your parents so you can’t leave it with them. Even if you could, it may not be safe. Your dad might throw it out while tidying up. You can’t afford a safety deposit box at a bank.
That’s just one scenario. You get the picture.
Why not memorise it? Full disclosure. I’m a memory coach with 39,000 students. I created a course to teach Bitcoiners how to memorise their seed phrase. It didn’t take. Nobody trusts their memory that much. If you do, injury, illness, or plain old panic can wreak havoc.
There are circumstances where you would want to take your wealth across borders in your brain. If I were in Iran, Syria, or a refugee in any war-torn country, I would prefer to do this than turn up at my bank to find withdrawals were limited to $10 a day.
But for people living in fairly stable countries, the most likely reason to lose your seed phrase is that you mislay it or the dog ate it. It might be stolen. Sometimes a software update goes wrong.
If you have a hardware wallet (good idea) and enter your password incorrectly three times, many devices decide you are intruders and lock it permanently. The only way to recover your funds is, you guessed it, your seed phrase…. which is where exactly? You haven’t needed it before, so you have no clue where it is. This happens every day to someone.
Less likely is a fire or flood. It’s always possible, and if you have a lot of sats, you don’t want to lose them all in an instant of bad luck or carelessness.
Some people get a metal plate and stamp the words on it. This can offer protection from fire or flood. But it doesn’t solve the problem. You just have a harder copy than paper.
Storing it on your computer in any way is a big no-no. Hackers know all the possible words and have programs to search for them. Don’t think you can leave it as a draft email to yourself. Don’t imagine a photo is safer. Optical character recognition, anyone?
If you do lose your seed phrase, there is no help desk. There are companies which you can pay who can recover your wallet. But if your backup plan is hope that’s not a very good plan. And it could be costly. Pity the man whose hard drive is at the bottom of a Welsh recycling facility. If he ever manages to get it back, he will only keep a fraction of the millions he lost. It will be costly even if he gets permission to dig, which today seems unlikely.
What would be a better solution is to keep your seed phrase with you but in a way that nobody could steal it and only you could recover it. Sounds impossible. I’m not talking about obfuscating the words. I’m not talking about memorising the words.
It’s possible and safe to write your seed phrase down precisely as written with one tiny change.
I couldn’t quite believe it myself. How come nobody else has ever talked about this?
So I spoke to five experts independently, who all agreed. One is from one of the top security labs in the world. Three are companies which specialise in helping someone get their seed phrase back if lost. I posed as a customer and told them I had my seed phrase with the little twist. Could they help? All said the same thing. Sorry. So these are people at the top of their game turning away a paying customer.
If you make this one change, you can safely write your seed phrase down, and nobody will be the wiser.
To find out how just toddle over to https://www.binkbonkbank.com and join the free course there.
Why not just reveal it here? I want you to understand exactly how it works, so I won’t explain the hack here because I want to be sure you fully understand. After all, it’s your hard-earned sats which are at stake.
This is my contribution to bitcoin education. The fewer people lose their funds, the faster the network will grow. Everyone benefits.
A last word
Don’t try this at home, kids, but I am so confident that this is safe that I have put a million sats in a wallet and published the seed phrase using the technique! Anyone who can figure it out is welcome to take the funds. Nobody has. Nobody ever will.
Look forward to seeing you soon.
P.s
The technique works for any wallet. So if you have other cryptocurrencies, you can also use the method. I only mention bitcoin because it is the first and still the best for too many reasons to explain here.
