Back up your hardware wallet recovery seed RIGHT NOW

After reading about it a thousand times but not acting on it, you finally became reasonable and ordered a hardware wallet to store your precious cryptoassets. After all, even if you did not invest more than you could lose, your little stash is now starting to grow to a hefty sum of money which you would like to keep away from thieves and accidents alike.

CAUTION : YOU ARE NOT OUT OF THE WOODS YET!

A hardware wallet is not enough

It does not matter if you have chosen to follow the majority and got a Ledger Nano S; if you are an old-timer with a Trezor, or if you got lost online and somehow ended up with a Keepkey. All of them will provide you at initialization with a mnemonic recovery phrase (AKA a seed) composed of a list of 12 to 24 BIP39 words which enables you to import your back-up in any compatible wallet.

You bought one. Good. That is a first step. Now secure it.

What you need to understand now is that this recovery phrase is your last resort in the unlucky case your hardware wallet gets lost, stolen, broken or cracked. That means you should find a way to store it even more securely than the hardware wallet itself because you want it to be safe against burglary, fire and even your rabid dog.

Also Read: Best Bitcoin Hardware Wallets

Protect your assets from Murphy’s Law

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong

You will be then battling against several type of odds in order to save your precious cryptoassets:

• Your phrase should be safe against Mother Nature temper tantrums.
• Your phrase should be safe against ill-intended people who want to steal it.
• Your phrase should be retrievable by your close ones if something bad happens to you.

How should you store that recovery phrase?*

⛔️ DON’T :

• Memorize it. Your brain is a squishy unreliable piece of meat. Your skull can easily be bashed in by a drunk driver. That is not what I call a safe place.
• Store it right next to your hardware wallet. That is like leaving the key in your front door’s lock.
• Upload it on any cloud storage solution (Dropbox, Drive, Evernote). Just don’t. Do not store it locally on your computer either. If you are held at gunpoint by a madman telling you to do it, choose the best encryption possible for it. Actually, you should never even type it once on a keyboard.
• Write down the recovery seed on a SINGLE piece of paper and store it in your house (where you also keep your hardware wallet). When your house is burning because of your dumb neighbour falling asleep with a joint in his hand, the flames will not avoid that specific piece of paper while melting your hardware wallet.
• Tattoo it on your right buttock. That is weird.

✅ DO :

• Check your recovery phrase by restoring your wallet at least once before usint it seriously. You can also use the “Check Recovery seed” feature from the Trezor wallet (if you do not fear keyloggers) or directly on the Trezor One.
• Store your recovery phrase in a secure place. Make it a fireproof safe if you store it home but be warned that a safe will be the first thing a thief will look at. Preferably, use a deposit box in a bank. I know we don’t like banks, but that is still something they can be useful for these days.
• Store multiple copies of your seed in different places. Two back-ups are better than one back-up. Three is best. Nine might be paranoiac.
• Split your phrase so that one would need to retrieve several back-ups to get the entire seed. This works well if you share the parts with different trusted family members and would allow them to recover the funds if something happened to you.
• Use a passphrase on your hardware wallet so that the recovery seed is not sufficient to get to your main stash. And leave some funds on an address not protected by the passphrase to keep plausible deniability.
• Buy a specialized piece of hardware to back up your seed. I am talking about Cryptosteel / Blockplate / ColdTI / Safewords. (I will soon be sharing with you a comparative review of hardware solutions to back up your recovery seed and I will link to it right here)
• Consider Shamir’s Secret Sharing scheme if you and your friends are knowledgeable about cryptography.

I am not telling you you should implement all of this advice at once. Just be sure to review your backup method periodically and accordingly to the value of the assets stored.

Safe HODLing to you all!

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* Feel free to suggest any addition or modification!