Bitcoin Forum

hi guys

on my trezor i have stored my BTC for years now, I STILL HAVE ACCESS TO MY BTC AND MY TREZOR WALLET THANK GOD, but i wrote the 23 word (i think) passphrase on a paper and stored that paper in a safe place, but recently i F moved to a different country, i took those documents with me but i think i lost them !

am worried they might fall to the wrong hands ! so i need to change the passphrases which i no longer remember, how to do that ??...

this is what it looks like from inside my wallet:
http://grabilla.com/0b506-13779c80-2355-4b01-aca5-aa1391cb6b14.png

thanks,

The seed phrase is 24 words long.

If you've lost your seeds, you have to create a new wallet and transfer the funds to an address in the new wallet. You can't change the seed phrase without generating a completely new wallet anyways.

Apart from the good advice given by @ranochigo, I would just like to clarify that the 24 words are called seeds. The passphrase is a different thing, a phrase that you can add separately as an extra level of security. I say this because it is better to properly use the vocabulary to ask for help, in this case you understand what you are saying by the context but better learn the specific terms and use them.

You can't get a wallet backup back once it's lost. In the first place, if they were easily recoverable, then that would be a huge security loophole.

1. Create a new temporary wallet on a decently secure device, or preferably another hardware wallet
2. Send all the funds from your old Trezor wallet to the new temporary wallet
3. Reset the old Trezor wallet and generate a new wallet, with a new set of 24-words backup
4. Send the funds from the temporary wallet, to your newly generated wallet on your Trezor

If I were you I will buy another trezor hardware wallet (because I don't want to temporarily transfer my funds in hot wallets for safety reason). Set-up or generate the new seed phrase in the new trezor wallet. Then transfer all btc and any other coins.
After that restore the new seed phrase in the old trezor wallet. Now you have a back-up hardware wallet incase one is destroyed or lost.

You don't change your passphrase, you create a new wallet from a new passphrase and send there.

One variant for the steps is pretty well described in mk4 post (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5335776.msg56954522#msg56954522).
I don't want to confuse you more, but it may worth considering Tails OS for the temporary wallet, since it's on USB stick with Electrum already installed (although it's not easy peasy if you're not computer savvy, you have to write down a temporary seed and keep in mind that's temporary, it would be wonderful to temporarily use the Tails as cold storage and there are a lot of transfers and reboots necessary).

On the other hand, if the funds are consistent and you're not computer savvy, the safest course of actions is to buy a second hardware wallet and transfer there. Of course, this time write down safely the seed.

You should keep passphrase separately from your 24 mnemonic words, but it is good thing to have several passphrase copies stored in different locations, and please don't trust flimsy human memory to remember anything.
Safest thing would be to send your coins to different wallet you control, than reset you trezor wallet, generate totally new seed words and add new secure passphrase.


Passphrase is like a added salt and once you mix it with your seed words you can't change it or remove it anymore, but you can create multiple passphrases just make sure you pick one that is secure mix of several words and numbers.

thanks

i already transfered my funds to a different wallet
wiped the trezor memory
set up the trezor all over again and wrote down the 12 words seed, is that right ?...

this 12 words is one to use to recover your funds in case for example the trezor is lost or broken and described here:
https://wiki.trezor.io/Recovery_seed

i must admit i was confused a bit with the terms...

so now i understand that the PASS PHRASE is only optional to create a HIDDEN WALLET:
https://wiki.trezor.io/Passphrase

correct ?. does it serve any other purposed if my wallet is lost or stolen ?

thanks,

i think i was confusing

Sounds good. You can also do the dry-run recovery (https://blog.trezor.io/test-your-seed-backup-dry-run-recovery-df9f2e9889) to see if you have written down your seed correctly.


You should read about this Trezor exploit (https://donjon.ledger.com/Unfixable-Key-Extraction-Attack-on-Trezor/). If you are worried about any physical attacks then you should use a long passphrase.

It serves as another security layer against physical manipulations of Trezor hardware wallet. The link Rath_ shared describes an unfixable bug in the design of Trezor devices. The bug allows an attacker (who knows what he is doing) to extract the seed phrase from a Trezor if he has physical access to it. A strong passphrase or an SD card that stores a secret code are two ways that vulnerability got solved.   

Passphrase is only optional but I would highly recommend that everyone who owns Trezor wallet uses secure passphrase because it is not stored anywhere on device and it improves security for your device.
If you lose your device or your seed words, nobody will be able to take your funds if they don't have your unique secure passphrase, so keep it safe on separate place.