lost HW wallet = lost bitcoin-funds?

o_e_l_e_o

legendary

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Quote from: joe1234 on March 31, 2021, 11:25:33 AM

Can the Bitcoin funds be restored with the 12 word seed?

That is the entire purpose of the seed phrase. It backs up your entire wallet.

All the private keys in your hardware wallet, not only for bitcoin but also for every altcoin it supports, are generated deterministically from your seed phrase. What this means is that given the same seed phrase, you will always generate the exact same private keys in the exact same order. The same private keys will always generate the same public keys and the same addresses, and therefore give you access to the same coins.

ranochigo

legendary

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Quote from: joe1234 on March 31, 2021, 11:25:33 AM

As I understand a hardware wallet does "only" store private keys...

It stores the seeds itself and also signs the transaction on it.

Quote from: joe1234 on March 31, 2021, 11:25:33 AM

But what happend if I am going to loose such a hardware wallet: Can the Bitcoin funds be
restored with the 12 word seed?

Your funds won't be restored. The private keys are generated from your seed. You can derive the private keys using the seeds alone. As such, you can spend the funds using your private keys.

Certain devices has inherent seed extraction vulnerability (Trezor), so if it gets lost/stolen I'll recommend you to transfer your funds to an address generated from a new seed ASAP.

joe1234

member

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Merit: 33

Hello forum

As I understand a hardware wallet does "only" store private keys...

But what happend if I am going to loose such a hardware wallet: Can the Bitcoin funds be
restored with the 12 word seed?

Thanks!

Joe

Topic: lost HW wallet = lost bitcoin-funds? (Read 61 times)