Topic: Which seed should i choose? (Read 372 times)

He will understand it later on if something happens to that exchange. Even if we say, there's SAFU in that exchange like in binance, if there will be a hack, definitely you can't have access to your funds right away. It means, you may need to wait for them to resolve the situation before you can access to your funds. What if you badly need such funds? You don't have the time frame when will you get it. And that for sure is like waiting in vain. So it is always advisable to store your coins where you have full control of your funds.

You do not understand the point of Bitcoin. NYKNYC

Or OP could use a cold wallet that they called or physical wallet, I know there are a lot of that product in the market and so far those physical or cold wallet are safe, I dont want to mention any product because I dont promote them, But I think that is a good product to use, yes you will need to buy it but its just a small thing in order to protect and store your assets other than storing it in an exchange which is not a good idea because there's a posibilit that it would be co.primised and your assets could be stolen, so yeah I recommend cold wallets, but you need to keep it with care because it is physical so if you lose or broke it then there will be a problem, anyway everything has its disadvantage but I think its more efficient and convinient to use that in an exchange platform.

Never you store your coins in exchange market, when you know you are not selling your coins at the moment, because your coins are not safe  there, and many people has loss their coins in exchange because they leave the coins for a long period of time.

Any wallet that you know that is safe for your coins, I will advise you to continue using it to store your coins, and it will make you to have peace of mind anywhere you are because your coins are not in the exchange market.

I believe you have seen or heard about electrum wallet before, you can also try to add it to your wallets to hodl your BTC because it hard for scammers to scam your BTC from the wallet.

It is better for you to move your funds from Bitget exchange to a noncustodial wallet like Electrum or blue wallet, where only you have the private keys for the safety of your coins.

You might think that your coins are safe with them, but they own your private keys and can freeze your assest anytime or hackers can hack the exchange and your funds will be gone, if the exchange crashes. You saw what happened to Luna and FTX. Exchanges should be treated like market place and not like bank. Bitcoin have given you the opportunity to be your own bank, why not accept such freedom.

Not your keys not your coins.

For a Bitcoin wallet, a seed phrase (also known as a recovery phrase) is typically generated by the wallet software itself to ensure security. You should use the provided seed phrase and store it securely. Do not create your own seed phrase, as it may compromise the wallet's security.

Which exchange? It's the wrong mindset that our funds aren't SAFU with CeX. I have been using Bitget for a long time now and keeping my funds there cause I see they have the transparency and proper security arrangements to safeguard user's assets. They review their wallet from time to time and the valuation of their Reserve Fund in addition to the User Protection Fund which is another layer.

The choice between the two seed formats will depend on your needs, all 2 options are safe and great, but I will mention some points from each mnemonic to help you with your choice:

1 - Electrum seeds don't have checksum as BIP39, instead, it's carrying a version number, this version number will determine whether the wallet is old (legacy) or segwit.

2 - Electrum seeds don't support nested-segwit addresses (p2sh-segwit starting with 3), however this type of address is falling into disuse, due to the bech32 standard already being well matured in terms of adoption. So this won't be a problem for you (I believe).

3 - Electrum seeds only have 12 words, while in BIP39 you can choose between 12, 15, 18, 21, 24 words (I think even more).

4 - Both electrum and BIP39 seeds provide support for passphrase, a function that derives hidden wallets based on your passphrase, this additional password becomes an extension of your seed. It's therefore crucial not to lose both items, otherwise you will lose access to your funds.

5 - Electrum seeds don't support BIP-85.

6 - Electrum seeds are recreated and recognized only on Electrum and Bluewallet, I won't go into depth because others have already answered this.

My opinion: I use both standards, the electrum standard is criticized because it has not been adopted by the industry like BIP39, so people can't import an electrum wallet into other apps, but this exposes your seed to risk, electrum is a wallet for desktop, this is the company's proposal (although it has a mobile app, but I haven't used it in years).

BIP39 mnemonic is accepted by all HW and wallets in general, so if you want to use your seed in other wallets (remembering that the more you restore in other wallets, the more your seed will be exposed), I like BIP-39 more because you can create accounts, this way you can use a wallet for each occasion, all protected by the same seed, whereas if it were on Electrum, you must create another wallet (seed) for each occasion.

BIP39 is the normal standard when it comes to bitcoin wallet seed phrase, and this currently supported by many other non - custodial bitcoin wallets out there aside including electrum as you mentioned, I am not saying you are wrong; but I've actually not come across the news stating that electrum will drop support for BIP39 mnemonic or seed type of phrase for bitcoin wallet, but even if this is true that they end up dropping support for this in the future, i am 100 percent certain that there will be other hundreds (if not thousands) of good bitcoin wallets that will still support the BIP39 seed phrase, you can easily use any of this wallets (used and trusted ones) to recover your bitcoins back when ever you want or need them back.

That seems very ambitious. We can revisit your idea some other time but this might not be as easily done as you might think so it is really better if you move your bitcoin some place else for now as you try and navigate through the things you need to do in order to make the said wallet.

All the technicalities, complexities and then the actual application might take too long that you might not be able to address what you wanted to in the first place.

In choosing the right crypto wallet, the seed phrase is a very important factor. For what reason? therefore making it easier to support wallets without the need to store secret keys. With the open source code, other developers can take over or rebuild the wallet, although there are concerns if the wallet stops being developed.
Don't worry if there are wallets that don't support seed phrases. With other tools, you can still generate secret seed phrases. This method is the same as using a Bip39 seed phrase, so you don't need to worry about the availability of wallet support because the seed phrase is easy to use and secure.

I don't think they did it on purpose, but i agree it is unacceptable. Also, their customer details has been hacked...

It seems to do the job as i get a 12 words list...


Ok, i still need to have a better understanding of this (for my knowledge). Indeed, for me a random number from a computer is always pseudo-random. I found a link that might help me:
https://docs.python.org/3.8/library/secrets.html

The code is from: https://github.com/trezor/python-mnemonic/blob/master/src/mnemonic/mnemonic.py.

Looks okay to me, but I'm not exactly a security researcher. Your code looks okay assuming that the code is working as intended.


Edit: Please do not use anything that can be easily determined as seed when you're trying to generate something random. Use the secrets module, and if you're unsure about how exactly CSPRNG should be implemented, don't touch it or you might inadvertently generate something insecure.

If you're unsure about the technicalities behind generating a Bitcoin address, you should also refrain from implementing your own. Any errors can result in you being unable to access your funds.

The Python code is extremely simple and since it is from:
https://github.com/trezor/python-mnemonic
i assumed (wrongly?) that it is the way Trezor wallets generate their Bip39 mnemonic:
>>>from mnemonic import Mnemonic
>>>mnemo = Mnemonic("english")
>>>words = mnemo.generate(strength=128)
>>>print(words)

Is it safe to use?

Thanks:)

The link is very interesting indeed. Here is a script:
import random
from datetime import datetime
random.seed(datetime.now().timestamp())
T=[]
for i in range(127):
        x=random.random()
        if x<0.5:
              T.append(0)
        else:
              T.append(1)
print(T)

Not sure if it is better than the previous method though...

Electrum generated  SEED phrases are safe but not applicable  to other wallets. Thus, if  I were in your case I would  generate  BIP39 SEED phrase  manually without recourse to any wallet by simply using flipping coins or dice methods. Good tutorial on how to do this with dice you may find here.

The entropy is the raw bytes before it was converted into your mnemonics. It is not useful to you.

Entropy is random, and you cannot exactly measure randomness, or at least to any accurate extent. Seemingly random strings can be deterministic and vice-versa. You can safely stop at generating the mnemonics without going further.

I haven't seen the code yet and I can't comment much on it. I would recommend just using another wallet that generates BIP39 instead of going with a less well-known script, or just go with Electrum. No downsides there.

Mate, first of all, remember that Ledger wallet is the worst idea because this company is shady, they were telling us that it was impossible to get data from their secure chip but then they offered Ledger Recovery service that in fact gets data from their secure chip. I wouldn't trust them after this accident and if you are aiming for hardware wallet, you better buy Coldcard or Passport.

BIP39 and BIP39 wordlist will be supported by Electrum, at least in the next few years. I think it will be supported for almost forever because there is simply no reason to not use it, it's secure as hell and writing down some words is better than writing down 010101.

If you are still afraid of BIP 39, you can use a vanity address generator and generate a bitcoin address where you'll get address (custom if you wish) and private key that you can later import in any wallet.

P.S. My advice would be to not worry over something that you don't have to worry. Anyway, if something changes, you can always use an old version of software, create a new wallet in new software and send Bitcoins from old to new address.

Ok, thanks for the answers. So, to sum-up here is my plan:

1) Generate (and carefully save) a BIP39 mnemonic code (offline) using this:
https://github.com/trezor/python-mnemonic
Indeed, Electrum wallet doesn't generate Bip39 mnemonic and i would prefer
to have one.
I tested the few lines of code and it worked.
Still there is something i don't understand:
entropy = mnemo.to_entropy(words)
I guess the aim of this line is to check the randomness of the list of words.
However, i got this:
>>> entropy = mnemo.to_entropy(words)
>>> entropy
bytearray(b'\x18\xe2\xa9=\x82\xd4$\x915D\x98....................................\xb4\x7f\x02\x90f\xdf\x8b')
>>>
How this should be understood?

P.S.: I read that a 12 words list is enough and a 24 words list do not improve safety. So i will
go for a 12 words list.

2) Create a new (offline) wallet by importing the mnemonic into Electrum. Generate a "receiving" address

3) Send the BTC from the exchanges to this address.

Am i doing something wrong?

Cheers:)

No, Electrum and BIP39 represent two separate mnemonic standards.  It's not feasible to input a BIP39 seed phrase into a function to generate an Electrum seed phrase that generates the exact same addresses from the BIP39 seed phrase. 

I'd opt for Electrum.  Since it's widely used for storing bitcoin by many, it's extremely likely that it will remain accessible in the future.