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Hi there, I have been working on a new method for creating metal backups and would greatly appreciate any feedback on my method. I have written up a description of how to create the backup cards here: https://github.com/jakob6102/seedcard

This method is:
-Cheap and simple to create
-Requires minimal tools
-Small form factor
-Language agnostic
-Very durable

I believe this could be a good way to make metal backups simple and accessible to a wider audience as it only costs a couple of dollars to make each one and with the support of wallet software can be made very quick and simple to do.

This is an interesting approach. Thanks for sharing.
Just want to point out one thing, mnemonics can have different lengths[1] such as 12, 15, 18, 21 and 24 with both 12 and 24 words being the most common. You should also include a grid for these word lengths with dimensions to make it easier to print a grid for 12 words for example.

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki

https://github.com/jakob6102/seedcard <-- this is really fresh idea  :D its like some sort of morse code. would be great if you sell this  8)

Very nice share, I have been thinking about something similar using cheap metal but that is also durable, and yet hard enough not to make accidental punches. This is for sort of inheritance needs for me. Morse and binary are good ideas! I just wonder if I am overestimating ability of closeby relatives to understand what this is so am researching other means of signal language that could even work as backup maybe metal plate copies in Morse, binary and something else:)

Really good way to backup your seed phrase on metal sheets and what i like is storing and punching them in binary code first of all and then center punch it.Many times we saw people lost their backup phrase and don't have any access to their funds and regret of being careless.It is good to see that you have shared your idea on GitHub for whole community.You should also keep in mind different lengths for seed phrase as suggested by @pooya87 and make sheet accordingly for them.

You can have a look at test of various metals here : https://jlopp.github.io/metal-bitcoin-storage-reviews/

This can be more helpful to you in choosing the best metallic plate to know about heat or melting point and save them in any condition.

I think OP isn't selling the plates? Just the idea of etching the seeds onto a metal plate using an obscure method.

It would be a good idea to test it out on a stainless steel and get someone to stress it if possible. I know certain methods tend to result in the backup being really hard to see after that. It can be dependent on the kind of metal used for the backup as well though.

I've seen another approach not long ago. I don't know if it's new, but I find it rather cheap if you think that you do keep the seed on steel:
https://portofele-hardware.ro/pastreaza-seed-ul-intr-un-mod-ieftin-si-sigur/

Unfortunately it's in Romanian, but the images may be just enough. Or, translated with Google:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ro&tl=en&u=https://portofele-hardware.ro/pastreaza-seed-ul-intr-un-mod-ieftin-si-sigur/

Thanks for the feedback  :D, I can certainly provide files for shorter seed phrases. The other option is to just cut down the 24 word grid to the size you need.

Thanks  :). I might look at selling these if I feel there's enough interest to justify the capital requirements. This came about from me not liking the cost of existing options so it was designed to be cheap, I reckon they could be sold with the guide grid already attached for $5-7 dollars so way less than anything else on the market.

I used stainless steel which wasn't expensive and should be very durable to heat , acid and impacts. Yeah it not being recognisable is both a blessing and a curse, a thief or anyone that sees it isn't going to have any idea it's bitcoin related but then neither will no-coiner family members. Hopefully they should be able to realise it's important enough to not throw out considering its a steel card with a weird code stamped into in  :D.

The one I made as the example is stainless steel so it should be very durable but I still need to properly stress test it. If I was to sell it I would run tests with different stainless alloys to find which one seems to be the best for preserving the data on it. This design doesn't need the metal itself to be etched or anything like some other metal backup options so if in the worst case the plate is too hard to read the data from, you could always sand the top layer to clear it up and the punches would be deep enough to not be erased.

Thanks for sharing, this is another good method and is currently the cheapest way of making metal backups I think, you can even find 3D files online for a jig that makes stamping the washers very easy. However I think my design could be better than this as this method requires an English alphabet stamp kit and a hammer while mine just needs a cheap auto centre punch, you also need something hard to stamp the washers against to make the letters visible. It also takes quite a while to do and if you lose too many washers from the seed then you're in trouble.

OP, I advise you make longer merged posts and reply to everybody in a "grouped" manner, your way to make consecutive answers is not OK.


I agree that yours should be cheaper, just I find the word list to binary index file quite a drawback.
But it all depends on what each and everybody prefers, hence the more methods the better.


It may be because with the center punch it depends on how hard you hit with the hammer and you'll probably won't have all the punches at the same size (diameter).

Sorry for the confusion, the different sizes don't mean anything the dots are just supposed to represent marking the guide with a pen.

Yes I fully agree with wanting to be able to scan the plate directly with a hardware device, my next step of this project is probably going to be to speak to the amazing people working on the Seedsigner and see if they think it's possible to add that feature to their project. If it is possible then you could even have a mode on the device that will tell you the checksum for an incomplete seed, so you would generate offline the first 256 bits of entropy using say coin flips, mark them onto the guide then scan it and the device would give you the final 8 bits for the checksum. If scanning directly isn't possible I still think this could be useful, especially if the device lets you input the binary so you don't need to convert to words. While its 11 bits of data per 'word' vs 4 for an actual word, it should be less button presses as there's only two options (1 or 0) per character vs 26 letters to scroll through when inputting a word into a HW device.

Apologies for the individual replies, how do I make a longer merged post? do you mean reply to multiple quotes in the same comment? I'm sorry I'm new to bitcointalk.

Yeah the word to binary is currently the largest issue with this method; luckily it's something that can easily be remedied by wallet software giving the option to display the binary and trying to get some to do this will be my next task.

Yes, that's what I meant, sorry if I was not clear.
And you don't have to apologize to me  ;), just learn and do better for the future. I guess that the older posts will be (sooner or later) merged by a mod if you won't do that yourself.

The beauty behind this system is that no tools other than a centre punch and hammer are
required. My own way of producing similar plates is to use metal letter punches, it takes
more time though.

I like the idea of possibly being able to scan the binary directly into a device but
it seems like it could be a bit more involved and could make it look more complicated.

Backup with metal seed is costly.

If you can save your backup safely, paper or USB is good enough to use. I don't have money to buy metal seed just for back up. I don't see this method is really safely and necessarily from the review in Metal Bitcoin Seed Storage Reviews (https://jlopp.github.io/metal-bitcoin-storage-reviews/) and Stress test (https://jlopp.github.io/metal-bitcoin-storage-reviews/why)

Hi, jakob. Welcome to bitcointalk!

I read the seedcard from github, thank you for sharing this with us. But, I'll be judgmental; generally deriving addresses from a seed was implemented to be able to recover your funds using a fixed number of bits no matter the addresses you've funded. Then, we combined it with the mnemonics which was a way to avoid any human mistakes.

While I do agree on having hierarchical deterministic wallets, I'd never use a non-encoded seed to store my money. Your solution seems fine for someone who's okay with writing the bits of the seed (essentially the entropy), but I think that the odds for a human mistake are more than they seem.

You said it yourself:

Thank you for the feedback and I certainly agree, not only is there more room for error but you also can't visually check for errors like you can with the spelling of words from a set list. How much do you think the wallet having the option to display the entropy in a visual format and creating this seed backup method from that alleviates this concern? I'm thinking it could be displayed something like this (again using "satoshi:10111111011"): •^o••••••^o••

It seems the same thing to me. It doesn't have a huge difference if you use 1's or •'s. You have to tackle the issue, by understanding how one would make a mistake. In these dots it isn't easy to recognize the position. One simply solution would be to show them like that:

Positions:
1: •
2: o
3: •
4: •
5: •
6: •
7: •
8: •
9: o
10: •
11: •

So the user just looks at the position which is shown in the left and then, the result. Still, the odds for a human mistake are more than with twelve words.

Assuming that you are familiar with mobile app programming, it would be relatively easy to make a simple app that would scan via the built-in camera and automatically convert to seed words. Something like a QR code scanner. There is just one problem, however: who would trust such an application? ;)

This is really interesting idea to make durable and very cheap metallic backup for your seed words, that most people wouldn't even know to read and crack, so it is another layer of protection.
It would be nice if you could record a video explaining the procedure and tools you used to punch holes in stainless steel plates.
I would solve the ''issue'' of family members not understanding this code with a special letter (or video) with instructions for decoding, but this should be separated from plate itself.

How much time you needed for creating and completing one metal backup seed plate like this?

https://i.imgur.com/rV5jcoG.jpg

I will try and film a guide at the weekend and add it to the github repo. Most of the time involved is converting the seed to binary which probably takes about 10-20 minutes for a 24 word seed. Marking the guide then stamping the metal then takes under 10 minutes to do so that gives you a good idea of how long it would take if your wallet had the option to show you the binary and save you converting it.

Maybe someone can also create open source offline tool that can quickly so offline ''translate'' and convert seed words into binary codes, and maybe something like this exists even today.
Electrum wallet is not using BIP39 by default, but there could still be extension created for converting words to binary, and hardware wallets could implement something similar, but it needs to be more popular for someone to invest time making this.

Stay tuned for my new project called HandyDandy, it will focus on this type of things.

I'm not so old and unhealthy to be thinking in panic, but I'm definitely worried everytime I see or hear about a friend who died or who is signing up for a will. I don't really want to go that route yet but for sure have to think about something like this that lasts, and also that can have a high chance of being understandable by someone else.

Imagine, 100 years from now on some AtticTreasure show someone finds your steel plates and buys it for $5 to be used as scrap metal :o

Very cool.  I was going to merit your post, but I've apparently already given you 50 merits in the last month, so I can't give you any more for now!  Dang.  I'm going to bookmark that site.

OP, this is a very interesting approach to storing private keys, and this is one of those times where I'm glad I un-ignored Bitcoin Discussion.  This thread might be better suited for one of the wallets sections, but whatever.  I've bookmarked your github page and the word list conversion one as well for future reference.  This is probably one of the best, most innocuous ways to store keys that I've seen, and if you only own one coin (and holding it long-term) it's much better than a HW wallet IMO.  Thanks for posting this!

That's definitely a risk with a method like this one.  Personally I think anyone with crypto should let at least one person they trust know how to recover the crypto in case they die.  Why let it go to waste?

OP how thick is that plate? if I hit hard, will it penetrate backward?

What kind of stainless steel?, 300, 400, 200?, As I know, the best stainless steel is with have enough cromium and non magnetic also.


So why making it so hard even we can convert binary to text in vice versa using the tool https://github.com/hatgit/BIP39-wordlist-printable-en

An interesting method, although something similar can be seen with some other solutions sold online. However, I don't think this is for the average user who has a problem saving a regular backup - because in a few years they will probably forget how to extract seed from their metal plate.

---

However, to generate a seed you need some kind of wallet - it has somehow become a common belief that HWs are the safest option for this. If someone after making a backup like this wants to reset HW or delete a complete desktop wallet, maybe this is one way to be safer from some unknown attack vectors in the future.


Ignoring as you can see makes no sense, because there are interesting things here - and while reading you can always report everything that is bad - I have already made at least 15 reports on this board today ;)

That's kind of you man but merits are just secondary approach but information sharing is what is all our priority and as an effective member of the forum we must contribute towards it regardless of any merit hunting.

But yes i am making you merit points even.Best wishes to you ahead.

Because people are lazy?  :D

In regards to the idea of scanning binary directly into a device, I have seen that some applications can use optical scanning to convert braille to text. This should work similarly, but simpler.

You are simply outstanding. I have never seen anything like that for crypto. This is really unique atleast for me. I don't understand how you got this idea. But after seeing the git i totally loved it. You work is truely appreciateable. Hope this will be the next trend in crypto industry. And thanks too for showing me something unique.




Well this is also a valid point. Thank you soo much sir for pointingout this point. This is a best thing of a legendary member because of your expertism a begginer like me won't be miss a point what you mention. Because after seeing his git i totally become his fan. I didn't thought about seed numbers but after reading your post i understand it is also needed what the topic creatot didn't mention. Thanks again sir.

Lazy and there's less room for error if you're copying the binary directly off the device. I don't think it would even need to be as complex as a braille reader, as long as the punches show clearly. Funnily enough I tried to find an open source braille reading app/code to see if it could read it but I didn't have any luck.

Yep, like I wrote above, I have been thinking about this a lot. And the problem is less of finding a method (I know even time lock can be used for example) but of finding a method that makes sure even if the person you trust doesn't know enough about Bitcoin, they won't have trouble accessing it after death. Sometimes I think maybe the only way, ironically, is to use a centralized service. Because in my case I know the person I trust is zero literacy about computers. Yes the person know how to surf and send email and use apps but cannot even remember how many times password is reset:)

exactly what we must do , actually i started the rally telling someone i love about how to recover my funds in case of accidentally dying.

and part of the recovery is to another person close to me so they must bind together when time comes so there will no single hand that will claim my funds.

How will someone with zero computer literacy use cryptocurrency anyway? Sending an email is one thing, but sending and receiving cryptocurrency is something entirely different.
It might be best to train a trusted individual in the basics of cryptocurrency before an unfortunate event occurs.

If you are serious about this let me know if you have some github or social media for following progress of that project, sadly I can't keep up with everything that is happening on bitcointalk forum.

I am not sure if this helps ( I didn't test it myself) but Liblouis looks like a open source braille translator and formatter, and last update was just few months ago:
http://liblouis.org/

He does have a github (https://github.com/Coding-Enthusiast). Follow him there.

Interesting
I always thought that such backups should be as clear as possible (and possibly stored in multiple places ), just incase you forget alot of things after a long while but luckily remember you have a thing called Bitcoin, rush to dig it up but find it hard to understanding what you wrote and no one could even interpret it. I tend to consider the possibility of things changing so quickly that lot of people don't remember their past or the past is twisted (deliberately or not) that the mind becomes entangled & unable to process those info

That's exactly the point here. Simple punch holes in the metal plate (representing a binary data) makes them much less susceptible to damage or decay than letters and numbers used in classic backups.

For sure those who dont have idea on what binary is or not really that fan of technicality will surely ignore this one but it isnt really that hard to understand on how to do such thing.

When it comes to storage then this one is indeed tough and wont be easily be destroyed or decipher if someone doesnt know on what it is all about.

The only thing you would mind is not to lose that metal plate.

Ahm uhuh, that's kinda what I was saying the whole time, please read better:) Most people are actually very low on computer literacy (minus surfing and emailing and social media etc, they have no clue about basic computer security let alone digital signing of wallets.

And that's why I think OP's got a really cool and useful product, but it still fails the test for "mainstream" people who you might want to pass your BTC on securely (As this is one use case for this).

For such people then I guess the best solution is a custodial wallet like Coinbase, although I don’t know how they will use even that if, as you say, they constantly forget their passwords. ;)
I don't know why we even discuss such users in this topic? This type of backup technique is an alternative to classic ways, such as writing a seed phrase or private key on a piece of paper, and is obviously intended for advanced users who know what they are doing.

Your comment that this method "fails the test for mainstream people" is equally applicable to all other backup methods.

Where do you find cheap stainless steel plates? I cant find any where I live and online is all ridiculous prices.

I don't know where you live, but few bucks is not ridiculous price, and you can literally find them anywhere in metal shops.

https://i.imgur.com/Qoo0qf3.jpg
ebay.com

This is indeed how I view this solution. It is another option for people to make a backup of their seeds. It's cheap, doesn't require a lot of tools or hard to get equipment... and unless you live next door to a factory with a large vat of acid towering over your property or near a volcano, it should be relatively hard wearing for all but the most extreme situations.

No reason you can't have one of these AND a "normal" steel backup with words/letters etc... redundant backups are a "good thing"™


Obviously, it's not the best solution for trying to enable recovery by your less than technical heirs... but that's not really the core objective of this particular solution, as far as I can tell.
;) :P

Are there other sites that sell cheap stainless steel 304 plates? I'd like them as close to credit card size as possible. Where did OP order his plates? He said they were laser cut too.

I'm ending up doing DIY etching and using steel blocks (the ones used by jewelers), found some on amazon.

I don't know what's wrong with ebay, amazon or any other website, but you can find them easily in your local hardware shop that are selling metal plates, just do your own research for your area.
Alternative for stainless steel plates are washers and screws that are made from same material and you can find them even easier.

I just ordered one from ebay. It should arrive in 2 months or so, it's coming all the way from the other side of the world. Cheap shipping. LOL. We'll see.

I got the 3mm x 100mm x 100mm one so it's as thick as some of the blockplates / seedplates / coldti versions and about 4 inches square.

I read another post someone just got an electrical box cover and stamped that. I might go look at my local hardware store and see. That one is probably galvanized steel, but still pretty heat and water resistant.

You'll be fine, but it's lottery with those slow delivery times.

I saw that post few days ago on reddit I think, and guy who created it said it's strong enough to withstand fire, but he didn't test that like we saw Jameson Lopp and other guys doing.
Generally speaking you'll be fine with both options unless we are talking about temperatures that melted T-1000 liquid metal from Terminator 2 movie :)

https://i.imgur.com/TsORMkL.jpg

Yeah, I saw that on reddit.

I found another one

https://preview.redd.it/jpnmh4ysw8571.jpg?width=3024&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=044f7a7c6d1eee9a6ad84b097582b7103bafbd24

Stick it on your front door? Raise the value of your house. Home improvement! "This one bedroom bungalow is worth $1 billion as it includes a bitcoin private key."

Nice, but you still need to play around those holes when you start adding seed words.
My next visit for hardware shop is going to be very interesting, examining everything made from stainless steel, and asking many strange questions along the way  ;)