Topic: Creating your own seed ? (Read 144 times)

Use Electrum then it is open source, secure and it is used by most of the Bitcoin community or you could use Bitcon Core which is the official Bitcoin wallet client and is the most secure because if you trust Bitcoin you should trust the developers that are developing Bitcoin Core. Picking your own words for a seed is not random and is not secure.

I didn't know that about SeedSigner. I will have to look into that further and see if they have plans to change that in the future. What hardware wallet/signing device do you use/recommend to all of your friends, family, etc?

On a related note, my buddy and I were working on this the other day and he was able to successfully run this python script from GitHub (https://github.com/massmux/bip39checksum) with 23 random BIP39 words and the script calculated all 8 of the possible checksum words. I thought it was pretty slick.

He ran this on his desktop computer but we have not tried to get it to run on any sort of air-gapped device yet. We have ordered some simple hardware for like $15 that we hope we are able to use with this script so we can get more people to be able to generate their own entropy with cheap otc hardware that is completely air-gapped.

I am also working on how to calculate the checksum by hand but that requires some knowledge on how to calculate a SHA-256 hash by hand and I have no clue how to do that ...yet.

Did the whole thing with some cubes.

The source code of SeedSigner is unfortunately not reproducible, so it can theoretically be viewed as closed source, and for security reasons I only use wallets with open source

If you can generate your seed phrase by yourself (assuming you do the steps correctly), that's great.
Using electrum on a safe device (recommended to be air-gapped) is also good. Electrum is an open-source wallet and is secure enough.


Electrum allow you to generate a 24 word seed phrase. To do so, go to console and use the following command.

Why would creating via Electrum be better than using the cube method?

As far as I know you can't create a 24 seed phrase with electrum.

First off, congrats on wanting to generate your own seed phrase. I recently went deep down this rabbit hole cause I wanted a deeper understanding of how seed phrases work.

When you say that you "picked out 11 words", how did you pick them? Did you use a random word lottery? or flip a coin 128 times and convert that entropy into seed words?

There are a couple of online sources that I know of but you definitely DO NOT want to use any online service to calculate your checksum word. I am in the process of trying to figure out how to calculate the final checksum word in a completely offline and air-gapped way that is easy for noobs to do but it is more difficult than I would like it to be.

For experimentation and learning more about seed phrases and entropy, these tools are incredibly helpful.

Ian Coleman: https://iancoleman.io/bip39/
Bitcoiner Guide Seed Tool: https://bitcoiner.guide/seed/
SeedPicker: https://seedpicker.net/calculator/last-word.html

NOTE: There are all online so they are best suited for experimentation and learning. Do not use them to calculate a checksum word that you will use to hold real bitcoin unless you understand the risks involved and know EXACTLY how to run these programs completely offline.

Personally, I use a SeedSigner and either flip a coin to generate the entropy for each seed word or I just use my SeedSticks to randomly select 23 words and then calculate the final checksum word with my SeedSigner.

I actually wrote a series of articles on 4 steps to secure your seed phrase and securely generating your seed phrase is the first step.

Here are all 4 of the articles on how to secure your seed phrase if you're interested.
- Generate your seed phrase
- Write your seed phrase
- store your seed phrase
- recover your wallet with your seed phrase


If I were you, I would do whatever possible to build a SeedSigner to calculate the final checksum word. It's currently the easiest way that I have found to calculate your final checksum word on an air-gapped device. SeedSigner is also my favorite hardware wallet device because of how easy it is to broadcast transactions while also keeping the device completely air-gapped.

I hope all of this helps you on your path to generating your own seed phrase as well as helping your friends and family to do the same.

Let me know if you have any questions or need some clarification.

To generate the seed phrase using Electrum is better, or using a reputable BIP39 wallet. Bitcoiner2023 should just know that seed phrase generation on Electrum is not the same as it is on BIP39 wallets because Electrum seed phrase has a version number which makes the entropy to have more bits which is used, making checksum not needed, whose purpose is to indicate which derivation should be followed in order to derive private keys and addresses:

https://electrum.readthedocs.io/en/latest/seedphrase.html

Assuming that we are talking about BIP39 seed phrase, the difference is that a 12 word seed phrase provides 128 bits of entropy and a 24 word seed phrase provides 256 bits of entropy.
It may worth mentioning that since a bitcoin private key provides 128 bits of security, 12 words are enough.

Not only about seed, you can learn more things about Bitcoin with Learn me a Bitcoin website. HD wallets

Chapter 5, Wallets in Mastering Bitcoin book.

Why not use a good lightweight client like Electrum to generate a 12 or 24 seed phrase instead? I mean, it has been proven that humans are bad at generating random numbers^[1], let alone picking English words from a list of iancoleman^[2].

[1] http://www.loper-os.org/bad-at-entropy/manmach.html
[2] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/english.txt

And I think this might help you if you intend to know how bitcoin addresses are generated from scratch for educational purposes: How Bitcoin Addresses are generated? Understand the Math behind Bitcoin

Got it now thank you.

it is also explained well here:
https://vault12.com/securemycrypto/cryptocurrency-security-how-to/generate-seed-phrase/


Now I ask myself the question, does the whole thing work with a 24 seed or are there differences in the creation of 12 seeds and 24 seeds?
or is it one and the same pattern?

You are not generating seed phrase, you are only generating 12 words which is not in anyway to be called seed phrase. The words in seed phrase are not just randomly selected words, it is generated from bits of entropy in which the last word is generated from checksum in combination with the last bits of entropy. The combination of the bits of entropy and checksum make up the seed phrase.

I will advise you to just download a reputable wallet and use the wallet to generate seed phrase, or use the offline html of Incoleman for it, do not use the online website.

Hey friends need a little help.

I would like to create my own seed.
I picked out 11 words from the Bip39 list, but now I'm wondering how do I calculate the 12th word for my seed?

Is there a generator somewhere that can be used offline to calculate/display the 12th seed?


Thanks