What I normally do whenever I create a new seed is to snap it with another phone because I don't like stories that touches the heart as most times I normally create new seeds for several purposes so am always very careful with it. After snapping it then I write it down in my diary book and check very very carefully before I delete it from the phone though what I normally do most times is to rephrase the whole words in case someone incidentally gets access to my diary book and sees it so that's the safe way I normally do in other to protect my seeds.
I have several issues with this procedure and this is why:
- Taking a picture with a mobile phone likely exposes the picture to some cloud storage, like Google Photos, Apple iCloud, any app on your phone that fiddles with your picture gallery on your phone. Are you 100% sure your picture is only local on your phone? I doubt you can. If your mnemonic recovery words land in a cloud: how can you be sure, no human or robot can mess with them (OCR is a thing; picture cloud storage offers various fancy stuff to extract text from pictures, that's no rocket science).
- Rephrasing the words could be a good recipe for later problems and loss. It highly depends if you're able to remember to revert the rephrasing. People are different, but human memory is in most cases not very persistant, unless you regularly train, memorize, verify it thoroughly! For verification you likely need a physical backup you can 100% rely on. The latter makes memorising somewhat obsolete.
I can't imagine how you can paraphrase 12, or even 24 words, and carry it all in your head. Probably, this person should have a phenomenal memory and confidence that nothing will ever happen to him. Although, can we know what awaits us even in an hour?
How often do we meet people who invent ways to store their seed phrases that are so stupid, and they subsequently suffer from their inventions? Everything simple has already been invented a long time ago; there is no need to go crazy.
Would be almost my words, except that without medical issues, I'd say with proper method anybody can memorize 12 or even 24 mnemonic recovery words. You would have to train your memory regularly and verify your memory also regularly. For reliable verification you would need a proper physical backup. This physical backup on the other hand makes memorization in human brain rather obsolete.
If you only rely on your human brain as storage: this is a recipe for later desaster and loss of your wallet. Don't do this.
(of course running offline, air-gapped, running a Live Linux DVD from RAM, with the curtains closed on a computer that I'll burn in holy fire afterwards)
You are taking the definition of extreme paranoia to a completely different level. Not that I do not like it though, the more precaution the fewer the worries.
Obviously I don't have holy fire, but indeed, peace of mind is the main point.
I read the "holy fire" as a joke and I liked it. The important message is that no traces should be left on that computer on which you fiddle around with unprotected mnemonic recovery words or private keys. Running a Live Linux solely in RAM which stays offline should be enough. At the end of your session when you shut down or turn off the computer is kind of a virtual holy fire for the bits in RAM.
