Bitcoin Forum

no longer available, i will rewrite it later.

Nice tutorial & I really appreciate the effort you've put into this. It'll probably be used by a lot of people but I wouldn't trust myself to remember anything ;D

I trust my ability to safely store paper wallets a lot more than my memory for something like this. 

Nice share. :D I actually does this kind of memorization back on High school days on my army training. I had to know everything and be familiar with it as a Battalion commander.
Makes me realize I can also do this in my wallet, I don't have to search for that piece of paper where I wrote my codes. :D

Thank you for this refresher. I remember using this route technique to memorize a whole deck of cards when I was younger.
In addition of what OP said, if something always makes you stumble on that imaginary route, replace it with something absurd. That should do the trick to remember it easier.

nice tutorial, i apriciate it it may helpfull for the community
as for me just print out the private key and keep it safe or create a paper wallet, i think it's eassy

Nice tutorial, but since i don' t have a good memory, i prefer to write my key/passphrase on a piece of paper and then put it in a secure place

Thats an awesome move to make even a beginner keep his private key safe.
Still at times we will enter wrong details. So having few backups in the
form of paper wallet is helpful

Yep, this way you can hold bitcoins while you are on vacation.

If you fear that your hardware wallet gets stolen, just memorize the password for it and only input it in the wallet after you have arrived.

Many pickpocketers could target the hardware wallet in your pocket if you go out on the street, so it might be helpful in that case.

Great tutorial! I doubt many ppl have that confidence to memorize the seed which associates with some money. But we can keep practicing it.

Depends, written down things arent safe either, any burglar can obtain that easily.

A bit strange... I mean I appreciate the tutorial and all but... Why not just writing it on a piece of paper?

I mean ok it's not perfectly secure but... Come on...

To be stolen you'd need your piece of paper to be taken (so you'd need to be robbed, which is not very lucky already). But to be robed by someone having enough time to read your piece of paper and consider it interesting! So by someone having enough time to read it AND knowing enough about btc to suppose that it can be a secret seed!

I don't say it can't happen but... Come on... It can't happen xD

Nice try, but I do not think this method is effective and can work with most of bitcoin users. I think there is no use from memorizing the priv key or the passphrase because one can easily create dozens copy from it and hide them in different places or storing it in his email address then this will be enough and safe

So did anyone tried out this technique.

You can memorize any seed in like 15 minutes, and it stays there in your mind for a long time.

Just refresh you memory once a week and it should be impossible to forget.

Nice information in that tutorial but i thing we can write it on piece of paper and keep i save. Or maybe email it to our address and use it when require. But still its good information for those who want to remember private keys in their mind.

Wow. mind blown. Great tutorial, but after reading this whole thing I think i'll stick to printing 10 of those words out and storing 10 copies in my cloud drive and hdd. Really helpful for things other than a passphrase :) Not smart enough unfortunately

Very good tutorials but I am good at keeping things safe on place that are hard to find,with so many thoughts rushing on my mind I can make a mistakes somewhere along the way so I prefer where I am good at..

This is a good guide to memorized the sentence from seeds.. But some people has a low IQ so that they can't memorized it fast..
I suggest to try also convert letters into numbers just rely in cellphone nokia 3310 or buttons of old landline telephone that has alphabetical letters..
then save the number's in cellphone as your phone book number.. so that you can remeber it fast..

I have seen first had what Dementia can do to the brain, and most of the times Alzheimer too... so I will be very hesitant to do this for large quantities of Bitcoins. If

anything like this happens, I want my family to have access to my coins, and if this was committed to memory, they would not be able to use it, and it will be lost

forever. The old trusted methods of printed documents, protected with lamination, is still my preferred method of storing my private keys.  ;) {multiple copies}

dude, just write them on a paper or something. it's easy to forget stuff when you don't think about them for a while. so if you got sick for, say, a week you'll most likely forget a word or five.

I dont think most of them will make it with your tutorial to memorize a private key or passphrase the easiest way is to store it in a pendrive, write down in a safety book, store it in online or email. this are some ways which i am preferring to store my important documents the email id which is used only for this purpose and nothing else.

Nice, but the memory of different people work in different ways.
Not everyone has the visual memory required by this.

Everyone can do this, it's not hard. Just practice it 15-20 minutes and it will be easy.

I can memorize a seed in 5 minutes.

Perhaps it's easier if only 1 class of items is listed like animals.

You could do that for example assign 1 letter to an animal, and then only memorize a list of animals in order, and keep your reference list with many backups because that translates the animals to the letters.

You could make the reference list public too, because it's technically not confidential, but better keep it private for better security.

For example:

Elephant  -> A
Dog        -> a
Mouse     ->B
Cat         ->b
Zebra     ->C
Cow        -> c
Eagle      ->D

.....

So if the private key is something like this:  HUQuihAYF745I4h8H81HUq546sg2

It can be reconstructed as a list of animals with the method mentioned above.

I thought no one could remember it

I thought that seed was only a mnemonic phrase for backup. Yes it is a backup but I didn't know that it was the private key. Hahahaha its been a long time since I used an offline wallet.

It is not technically a private key, but it's the source of the private keys, that if it's compromized, all private keys can be derived from it that are in that wallet.

So yes it's the source entropy of the private keys in that wallet ,and it's confidential.

I know someone who did this a few years ago i was rather amazed, however i don't have the patience. Nothing wrong with printing it out :)

sure, but remember everything physical is public, and anyone can read it, unless you hide it very well

Did anyone tried out this method? Let me know if it works for you.

Nowadays passphrases are more preferable towards passwords, because it's easy to memorize.

I tried it last night (before the morning :P) but when i wake up i could remember completely the phrase, so i wouldn't risk to only save on my brain unless i have saved it anywhere physically.

This is true, anyoneone can remember their pass phrase with focus.
But when youre stress you will likely forget a part of the phrase.
Very informative topic, not just for storing keys to your memory but for enhancing memory too.

That's the 'Memory Palace' or Method of loci, it's a well known memorization technique that has been around since ancient Greece. Some memory champions use it even today. Any of you interested in memory feats can check out the link below for Pi memorization. This guy recited 70,000 pi decimal places blindfolded, it took him 10 hours to do it. I remember in an interview some years back, a Japanese guy who memorized Pi to 40,000 decimal places said he used this visualization technique to achieve his feat.

http://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/most-pi-places-memorised

Very useful tutorial, but since i don' t have a good memory, i prefer to write my key/passphrase/password on .txt file ;D

Wow i didnt realized this had already been invented, i`ve figured this out of my own when i was a kid, and had to remember damn poetry in school.

Looks like i rediscovered the wheel.

that's one weird kind of thread I have to say but pretty brilliant to use that kind of technique to memorize the seed. I was hoping to see the way to memorize the private key rather than the seed ;D Private key is damn harder to do that than the seed (at least the seed contains meaningful words ;D ). Anyway, thanks for your tutorial.

Really interesting method but I don't want to take the risk of losing the pw's if I am using a wallet with a large amount of money stored in it. Would much rather stick around to the old methods :)

I applaud your technique but some people may not be able to utilize this because different people learn in different ways. The issue is what if you have more than a few wallets that require you to remember your seed words ? I think it would be a little foolish to keep all your bitcoins in your wallet. My main concern is if you have two strings of seeds words associated with two wallets, the worst thing that could happen is something they get mesh together and you end up having two seed phrases from words associated with both wallet. Remembering your seed words is always nice but there is always the concern you might forget them at some point and time.

Well then generate new seeds for the 2nd wallet until all words are different from the seed of the 1st wallet, that way you can imagine 2 stories that are completely different and memorize them both with 100% integrity.

I dont know guys but you guys must be drunk all the time because it's really easy to memorize a password.

Look i have a very bad short term memory, i cant even remember what i ate yesterday, but i have a decent visual memory.


I can remember a password and i only need to retrain my memory 1-2 times a month, its really easy to memorize password with this method, and if your memory is below average then just retrain it 2 times/week, and i think it should be ok.

You could not memorize a private key unless you will save it on a word document or write it on a piece of paper.

Are you sure, because I can memorize like 80 words easily , and only need to retrain myself 1-2 times a month.

Wow, very cool man! How long have been training to get there?

It takes like 10-15 minute to memorize it, then repeat like 2-3 times monthly, and its hard to forget.

1 more thing, brain wallets are not secure.

There were tons of dumb folks here that used private keys like:   "Please enter password" or "You cant enter here"

Those are dumb people, and will lose their money.


You need random words, and the words can be easily memorized, or in worst case , write down to paper.

Good tutorial however not for me, I prefer to put the seed in 3 different locations, USB, external HDD and Laptops , as I am not very good with the memory. Thats how exactly I am storing my seed in an encrypted rar which has inside an encrypted Libreoffice writer document.

Hey, welcome everybody.

I just wanted to say: big thanks you guys, this thread is very informative!

Cheers,

Memorizing a passphrase is good assuming you are using it on a constant basis, but if you are not then it's very likely you will forget it. If you repeat this process once a week then that should be sufficient but alas humans are forgetful, and it's always good to have a written or digital backup somewhere.

Of course we have to write it on paper, store as some random letter or type as a text in our mobile devices. I don't think memorizing these words is good as primary way of keeping it.
It is more like secondary option for dedicated bitcoin users or paranoid individuals who doesn't trust anything.

Anyway it was nice tutorial, good job, Op.

Best way to memorize, or rather not forget, a passphrase is choosing a passphrase that only you can dig up instantly from your memory because you have special appreciation for it's origin. Could be a line from a song or poem, a quote from a movie or a line from your favorite book.

Guilty pleasures are a good source too since nobody probably knows what they are.

Poems, songs, lyrics, lines from books ,avoid those.

Dictionary attacks will  break your passwords pretty fast.


It has to be random stuff.

This is great , my father bought a book a long time ago about using flashcard memory to remember up to 40 things. I would ask him before and after work the 20 words and he always got every one of thrm. This method you are teaching us here is very similar. So I can confirm it works. This is the ultimate safety.

bump , since i see many newbies lose their coins on reddit because they fail to backup the coins ,maybe this tutorial of mine can help!