Written By
S. Porter
It's where everything for protecting your bitcoin is derived from: these 12 or 24 words generate the keys that allow you to spend your funds, making it critically important to protect.
Most proper hardware wallets make it very difficult to initialize them without physically backing up a seed phrase, and software wallets often provide them, too. This is what Trezor’s paper card for backing up recovery seed phrases looks like.
More technically, a seed phrase is the human-readable representation of a seed, which is really just a long string of random digits. The seed is used to generate your master private key, which generates the rest of your private keys.
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Seed phrases, generated by wallets that follow the latest bitcoin standards, pull from a list of 2,048 unique words established as part of Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 39, or BIP39.
Each word represents a range of bits in that long random number that is your seed. You might recognize some of the words in the image above, which we pulled from that list!
the number of words on the standard bitcoin BIP39 word list
A bitcoin seed phrase is made up of 12 or 24 of the words from that list, in a specific order.
They're also fully interoperable among hardware wallets that properly support the BIP39 standard! That means you can eliminate your hardware wallet maker as a trusted party and a single point of failure.
2048 words may not sound like many at first, and it’s often hard to comprehend how this string of words could be all the information necessary to protect your bitcoin. Think it would be easy to guess someone’s seed phrase? Guess again.
That's roughly the number of atoms in the observable universe. As long as you or your hardware device generates proper randomness, there are about as many possible bitcoin seed phrase combinations. Good luck with that.