Bitcoin Forum

When getting started with Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency, there are two terms you will hear a lot which are- private key and seed phrase. They might sound similar, but they play different roles in keeping your funds safe....
1) Private Keys
When you create a crypto wallet, it generates two things- a public key (like your account number, which you can share to receive funds) and a private key (your secret code, which must always remain hidden). The private key makes use of an alphanumeric string and it proves that you are the true owner of the coins in that wallet. Anyone who has access to it can be in full control of your funds, send them, spend them, or even transfer them to their own account.

2) Seed Phrase
A seed phrase (also called a recovery phrase) is a group of 12 or 24 random words that can recreate all the private keys in your wallet. This means if your phone gets lost or spoils, you can still recover your wallet, so as far as you have your seed phrase with you. Just think of seed phrase as the master key to all your wallet.

Why They Matter
Your pivate key and seed phrase are the two central backbone of your crypto security this is because if anyone gets hold on either of them they can take all your funds. That’s why you should:

- Never share them with anyone.

- Store them offline (write them on paper or make use of a hardware backup).

-Avoid saving them in your phone or computer where they could be hacked.

A seed phrase is mostly made of 12 or 24 words which can be used to recover your wallet in the future, in case you misplaced your seed phrase in the past you can not recover them without the seed phrase which is why you must keep it save. They are more like a words and not sentence. Without them your assets will be lost forever. here are some information you get about bitcoin enthusiast that have lost access to their crypto.

https://www.webopedia.com/crypto/learn/largest-ost-bitcoin-wallets/

Seed phrase can be 12, 15, 18, 21 or 24 words long.

You can have wallet on computer or have a hardware wallet.

Seed phrase is important because it can generates the private key which can be used to recover your coins or to spend the coins.

Because of Electrum and some other wallet that support custom seeds, I'll just simply put it as 12 words upwards ( although the 12, 15, 18, 21 or 24 words are the normal default ones)

Aside frome this people prefer to work with seed phrases because they are easier to manage, store and work with. But private keys are very important when it comes to things like coin control.

Seed phrases are hashed to get private keys and public keys the point is the private key is very important in signing a transaction. So consider the seed phrase like a compressed version of the master private key.

Thank you OP for this...
For better understanding
    Think of you wallet as a house.... Each Bitcoin address on the wallet is like rooms inside and a private key is a specific key to open the door to the rooms.. each door has it own key.. so each address has its own private key...
While A seed phrase is a master key of the house that can open all rooms... When you have a private key, you can only gain access to a specific address and the funds in it... While with a seed phrase you can gain access to all the addresses in the wallet and the funds in them
    Private keys are important especially when you want to diversify funds within a wallet fir different purpose as it helps you to access only the specific address you are interested in instead of all...

You are in the track, private key gives you public keys and public keys are what you can use to receive funds but this was in the early days, it was improved further with two different hash functions (sha256 and Ripemd160) to have a shorter version because public keys data are way too large and this makes your transaction becomes bogus in the transaction block. This public keys are not just public keys, they are compress keys after hash to give you a short version of an address.


Don't write your seed phrase alone on a piece of paper, you can as one means but that's not enough. If you are going to make a backup of your seed phrase, the material has to be water resistance, fire resistance and can last for ages, paper can get wet or get burn instead use a metal plate to engrave your seed phrase as back up.
Your hardware shouldn't be a place for backup, it can get stolen or lost and there is nothing you can do about it, better to use a metal steel/plate.

Electrum does not support custom word unless it is BIP39.

BIP39 is what I am referring to. They are 12, 15, 18, 21 and 24 words long. Not lesser not longer. Shorter is not secure while longer was not proposed. Nothing in-between but 12, 15, 18, 21 and 24 and that is what you will on BIP39 wallets. 12 words is common, then followed by 24 words, but some wallets like Sparrow can generate all.

I mean what that is most important is the private key, even seed phrase is important because of the private key that it can generate. That is the work of seed phrase. It is easy to backup which is the reason it is proposed and named mnemonic.

You can also talk about the difference between Private key and Seed phrase. They both serve as security lock or password to our wallets but  the difference is that privates keys can be generated from seed phrases.

Losing either your seed phrase or private key means losing access to all your funds. Seed phrase is most likely seen as the master key because it controls the security of every other wallet assigned to each private key.

Op, Theirs no much different between private key and seed phrase, both do same function, we use seed phrase as tools of recovering a private key when you wants to login your address to another device, that is why I said both works as a term and they're similar.

I have not see anyone who have a large amounts of coin or a bitcoin that lost his seed phrase, because if you have a big amounts of bitcoin in a wallet it will be difficult for you to keep it careless to the extent of forgetting the measures that you can keep your bitcoin safe, the most interested in bitcoin is that you will secure your seed phrase, I have memories one of seed phrase that I have a lot of bitcoin, but do you know that after I used the bitcoin in that wallet all, I forgot about the seed phrase, like now I can't remember the seed phrase except that I looked into the place I store them

There are many people who have no access to their wallet anymore, if you haven't seen it anyone, you can actually make some research and I'm sure you will bump into a lot of them. However I also posted a link on my comment above, you can as well click on it so you can read to see some top cry enthusiast that have lost a lot of Bitcoin because of carelessness or hacked wallet. Most of these crypto Enthusiast that no longer have access to their crypto anymore didn't start today. Majority of them have been into Bitcoin since the day Bitcoin was invested, so it's been long and at that those years there were not much of a safer method to secure seed phrases.

Securing your seed phrase is the most important part of your crypto journey  because  if anything bad happens to it that might be the end of those coins in your wallet especially when  you do not  have an additional  backup elsewhere. Most person only  understand the importance of their seed phrase after they've  lost it and that is why it's  important  we equip ourselves  with knowledge  before kick starting anything  especially  when it has to do with finance. The worst thing that can happen to a crypto enthusiasts is after staking enough crypto then he ends up losing his seed phrase because of carelessness or the account  got hacked  because of poor storage medium.

Well explained on the difference, Both our seed phrase and private key are very useful and personal informations that must be stored very well. So while it's not bad to store your seed phrase on paper, it's better to store them in a fireproof safe or it can be engraved on a steel plate for a better long term security for your wallet And also, the best practices for this is to always have more than one copy of your seed phrases stored, just in case because who knows anything can happen it's better to stay ahead of any mistakes or incident that will compromise the asses to your wallet.

Yes both are used to actually recover our wallet and any access to them gives access to your wallet. The difference though is that Seed Phrase recovers everything on that wallet while private keys depends on which private key was used, a master private key will restore all the assets on its child key, while the child key restores only what is on its address


We need to know that we don’t necessarily need to back up our private key, we can simply just back up the seed phrase and it will restore everything on that wallet even the private keys and public keys. Restoring Seed Phrases is much much easier because of the alpha numerical data that private key has.

Private things don't need and should not be shared publicly with anyone.

Offline, airgap are good ways to store your wallets that have big funds and your wallet backups.

If your device is online, you should not do it.
If your device is used offline, airgap, you can do it but a vital rule is always have different wallet backups. Avoiding a practice of having only a single wallet backkup as you can lose it anytime by accidents.

How to back up a seed phrase? (https://blog.lopp.net/how-to-back-up-a-seed-phrase/)

It's not doubt-able, because I know very well that is possible for someone to loss It's recovering phrase, I know that many people do lose their phrase but the problem is that so many of them doesn't know that how to document a seed phrase knowing that when it lost you can't have access in your wallet, as I said before, document my seed phrase offline  in good condition and also memories it very well no matter how long I want to keeping holding my btc in that address I will still have the seed phrase in my brain, and I will not miss any steps, that's how important the seed phrase is to me, people forget their own I don't know what they were thinking, but in actual sense we need to keep our eyes watching.

Yeah I think your explanation best suits the knowledge here. Here is an important notes to take by the way on that is seed phrase and private key are very important and if you lose any of them then you lose your asset.  the funny thing about wallet security is that is the one way something unlike your bank app where you get to reset even after lose of security details and that's why keeping of the your Master key being the seed phrase is the most crucial because I think with the seed phrase you can conjure up your lost private key.

This is very important for people to know, most especially newbies, Seed phrase stands as a master key to cryptocurrency wallet that is why it is always advisable that we should keep it save and make sure not one see it or have access to them, with your seed phrase anyone can have access to your wallet, it is very dangerous for someone to see or have our seed phrase that is why some people get scammed easily, both are very important but seed phrase is very valuable to than private key.

Seed phrase is all that matters most, because it can generates your private key and your funds will be moved, it's far more powerful but also easier to keep than private keys.

I've always have a hard time in the past keeping my private key offline, you can't write them on a book because they are sensitive compare to seed phrases, you can easily make mistakes and you will end up with a bad private key and lose access to your digital assets.

It's easier to backup seed phrases because they are just words, private keys consists of signs that ever existed, some are even capital letters and small letters sensitive with signs depending on the crypto project blockchain, I've seen a lot.

Exactly securing your seed phrase is most important thing you can do with your cryptocurrency. This phrase is like master password for your digital wallet and if you lose it you will likely lose all your coins. People mostly only realize importantance of it after they have already lost it. That is why it is so crucial to learn about crypto security and safely storing your seed phrase before you start investing. If you careless like writing phrase on a piece of paper that gets lost or storing it where hackers can find it can lead to you losing all your money.

I don't see any reason why people love to have bad experiences before they dedicate their time and effort  to learn about something to a great level. Some newbies only make out time to learn after they've lost some money then their curiosity begins,  but most people just tag the entire system a scam because they lost money but other people told them crypto was easy or better still profitable but they filtered out the part that loses are normal in this network and no matter the amout of knowledge gained one can still make lose in crypto especially ehen trading altcoins shit projects.

Considering that in Bitcoin and a lot of altcoins that copied the concept from Bitcoin, there is no such thing as "account number" calling public key that makes little sense.
Public key is just the public part of the duo that can be shared but in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, you don't share that. Instead you share your address that is computed using the public key.

A private key is just a big number (in almost all coins it is 256-bit) and that big integer can be encoded any way you like. In Bitcoin it is usually encoded using Base58 but you can encode it using any other algorithm yourself. For example here is a random private key encoded using BIP39 word list:

It is worth knowing 12 or 24 are the most common number of words in a mnemonic. However depending on the algorithm, it can be any number.

True I actually prefer the seed phrase instead of the private key due to this matter. However does this seed phrase is prone to brutal force? I mean its words so its quite easily be cracked by some mfers out there or private key is easier? Do we have some info or scenario someone able to do cracked it?

Both are actually important because when you don't keep them safe incase the holder don't have access to the wallet you will use any of the above to have access to the wallet and those that are holding for a long time need to keep both the seed phrase and the private key safe and majority of people actually prefer to use seed phrase than private key. The only challenge is that people are still finding it very difficult to keep it safe because since it contains a lot of latter's people are always trying to save it online which is a wrong thing to do because it been connected online it can be hacked.

That’s not the only advantage of using seeds, though. When you back up a seed, you back up a whole wallet (infinte number of addresses), while when you back up a private key, you back up a single address. Backing up private keys becomes impractical when you have many addresses.

It depends on how many words you know. If you don’t know any of them, then it’s almost impossible to find a wallet with funds just by brute forcing its seed.

It can be different numbers than 12 and 24, and it can be different in security with same 12 words or 24 words.

This article from Jameson Lopp gave many examples of bad seed phrases.
How Many Bitcoin Seed Phrases Are Only One Repeated Word? (https://blog.lopp.net/how-many-bitcoin-seed-phrases-are-only-one-repeated-word/)
They are examples of bad seed phrases need to be avoided. It can be only a test as I don't know any wallet softwares create such seed phrases as there is no reports on this issue as far as I know.

It might take some time to brute force a mnemonic phrase, if let's say BIP39.

12 word seed phrase has 128 bits of entropy.
24 word seed phrase that has 256 bits of entropy.

So the chance is really that tiny.

Exactly, written them on paper is one of the ways to save the seed phrase, but it is advisable to duplicate the copy and store them in a very safe place where only you will have access to.
However, against natural disasters like fire out brake, earthquakes, and floods; you can engrave the words in a metallic material to avoid being  washed away by water, or being burned by fire; doing this can be the best form of saving your seed phrase.

Saving your seed phrase online is the in either emails or saving them in your phone notes can be the worst method of saving your seed phrase because many of us feels so lazy to write the seed phrase down, they prefer ti screenshot the words and leave it in their phones which is very risky.

It is recommended to have mulitple backups because having only one single backup is so risky. There is possibility that you are in a situation when you lost both your original wallet and the only wallet backup. It, if happens, will turn to a nightmare for you because without anything left for wallet recovery, you lost that wallet forever.

The advice is always make multiple wallet backups, that you said, but it's not enough. Make multiple wallet backups in different formats in order to avoid situation when one format is damaged or even destroyed, you will have the others to use. It is also recommended to store different wallet backups at different places, just in case disaster comes in one place, you will have other usable backups in other locations.

How to back up a seed phrase. (https://blog.lopp.net/how-to-back-up-a-seed-phrase/)

Although, having a multiple copy of your seed or private key should enhance the safety of your funds but in some cases, it poses a set back to your security due to misplacement or inability to safeguard all at the same time. Having access to any of other copies will render the main one useless no matter how secure it is.


If this is still happening, it means people are not learning anything about securing their assets. Having your private keys screenshot on phone is exposing you to (1) your close friends or family who might have access to your phone and (2) the app developers whom you grant access to your file by using their app on your phone. At this stage, we should have outgrown the habit of storing our keys online or having them screenshot.

After understanding the importance of private keys and seed phrases, it is also necessary to explain why they need to be kept secret and stored in the safest place. It's important to emphasize that if you don't own your seed phrase/private key, you don't own your Bitcoin. Therefore, your private key/seed phrase is the most important part of owning Bitcoin and other crypto assets. Security needs to be enhanced to prevent your assets from being easily lost or hacked by malicious parties.

There are so many ways to store it, but everyone has a different method that is considered safe, comfortable and easy. Usually most crypto users store it on computers, flash drives and other devices, but most senior users on the Bitcointalk forum do not recommend storing PK/SP on these devices because they are very vulnerable to attacks and other unexpected things.

Always improve your discipline and get used to keeping it out of reach of people to protect the assets stored in your wallet. Writing on paper is also not a bad idea, but if you feel that paper is easily damaged or the writing fades when it comes into contact with water, maybe you can try printing it on metal.

Private keys can be generated from seed phrase, one seed phrase can generate multiple private keys. Both seed phrase and private keys allow access to wallet, once they are tampered anyone can have access to Bitcoin stored in the wallet. As of now, brute forcing seems impossible but in the near future with more computing, it might become possible to brute force a wallet secured with a seed phrase or private key.

Brute force right now is like you don't have anything to do and you want to some of your time. It's true that there are speculations about quantum computers and how they can break cryptographic functions of Bitcoin but the way approval of public used will have to come from the government first before it's public and with the way it's predicted to do alot of damage, government will not let it become a public tool, imagine if it's becomes something military used to spy on each other, Bitcoin is going to be their least concern because they hold it too.

If Quantum computer becomes a regular thing, rest assure there is going to be a new development to safely encrypt Bitcoin that no any other computer can break. Go back and check the history of cryptographic functions that were all strong and difficult to decrypt back in the days, modern computers were able to bypass them and solve them but new ones are available that this new modern computers can decrypt, that's going to be the faith of quantum computers when the time is right.

Great explanation! You demonstrated the similarity between the two points very well, and I think could add some points that the most people overlook in practice. For veterans, you already know that most crypto losses dont happen because have a failure in the blockchain or wallet, but rather due to carelessness with the private key or seed phrase.

In fact, its not uncommon to see newbies sharing screenshots of this, saving them to a notepad in their phone, by email or even uploading them in the cloud. This is a perfect opportunity for hackers, or even close relatives and friends who have easy access to this.

But something you didn't mention is that no one thinks about inheritance. What if something happens to you and someone in your family or someone you trust has access to your wallets and can recover them? There's no bank or other major entity that will help them gain this access. Having a plan for this will prevent your coins from being trapped forever.

So...keep it safe, but allow it to be retrieved by people you trust.

Yes, it is true that the more secure the private key of a wallet, the more secure his wallet is. So of course, these keys should never be left unattended, the more secure you keep them, the more careful you are. I have heard stories of many wallets being hacked, just because the pictures are left unattended and in an unsecured place, many of them get hacked and a lot of money is lost.
So it is best to write down the keys of these crypto wallets on a piece of paper in a diary and keep it in the safest and most secure place.

It is very crucial for beginners to stay aware and highlighted about the risks of loosing funds to third parties which is pegged on the storage system of their secrets keys.
The means by which those private keys are handled determines the security terms of your funds.

There are varieties to store wallets keys secured which can best be determined by our surroundings if it is an off-line storage. On-line storage might not really be a full threat neither trusted but being more than conscious so that you don't associate or link it storage system to a public accessibility or storing to vulnerable online system where hackers can smuggle in and gains access to your supposed privacy.


Here is where other problems of keeping safe lies because you will have to consider betraying as the case maybe, humans are liable to compromise untimely. But in any case, there is always necessity to atleast trust someone for one thing because at a critical times, you might be in need for intervention.

Talking about after live is something crucial to be put in considerations because it will been of no essence if family or loved ones can not inherit your labour (funds) if they don't have the access to your wallet.

You cannot possibly live as a family without trusting at least one member of your family. You certainly have concerns and judgments about your wife or children, who are closest to you, with whom you can share stories about your crypto asset ownership. You may not need to share your recovery seed and private keys with them. When the time comes, you should inform them about what you have and what you can pass on.
Currently, Bitcoin is no longer a highly secretive asset. In the future, every child may already have knowledge and even possess their own Bitcoin.

You are right mate, if you do not trust any member of your family then, you are the problem. In the past have lost my very first trust wallet till date, no trace of the secrete phrases and i have some crypto assets in it. I lost my phone and relocated, my jotter where i wrote it, i could not find it. That is how i lost huge sum of dollars.  I did not share my secret phrases with any of my siblings because the academy that taught me crypto advised us not to share it with any one. Have learnt my lesson, now my brothers have all my passwords and secrete pharse, if they want to scam me let it be family.

Hmm... I disagree. Money can destroy a lot of families. It makes them resort to borrowing money from people, arguing with each other constantly about money, and even stealing from each other. In fact, it looks like it is destroying my own now, not that there is much I can do about it.

That is the reason why I don't tell anyone about Bitcoin.

Then again, I am planning to move out, so there's that.

Actually the BIP-39 text is very clearly stating that "The allowed size of ENT is 128-256 bits" which means it does NOT allow generation of any mnemonic with entropy that is smaller than 128 bits (12 words).

What I said above about the "algorithm" was about other mnemonic algorithms out there that allow other word lists with different lengths that can produce a mnemonic with smaller number of words but with the same security. Remember that these words are just encoding of an underlying entropy and as long as that entropy is bigger than 128 bits, the derives keys are considered secure.

Ref: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki

Can't you still copy another recovery seed and store it in a different place if you don't want to repeat your experience? Actually, you don’t have to share the password and recovery seed with all your siblings. You can share stories related to your asset ownership but don’t share everything, including password details and recovery seeds. You really need to understand your siblings' character well. Surely you have heard of family stories that were destroyed because of money. But you have judgment about your siblings.

I don’t think writing your seed phrase on paper is the best way to secure your seed phrase. We should know that Incase of fire disaster or water damage, paper can easily be destroyed thats why whenever am recommending any to secure their seed phrase, then I do always encourage people to get multiple iron steel, carve their seed phrase on them, and store them in different locations. I will say it’s always more difficult for iron still to be destroyed than a paper, any slight mistake then your paper can be destroyed.

I know how important your seed phrase is, and it’s suppose to be properly secured, if anyone have access to your seed phrase, then they already have access to your bitcoin, thats why it should be properly secured, but if you are the only one that have access to your seed phrase, incase if anything happens to you how will your family member be able to access the bitcoin which you having? At least you should have a family member that is suppose to know where your seed phrase is stored, or you should store your seed phrase in a place where your family members will be able to see it easily Incase if anything happens to you.

Seed phrases can be very useful when you want to recover your wallet in the future so that it is a pretty important one and with the seeds of the seed will produce a personal key when recovering coins or when selling it. For people who use wallets like this already understand how to use and they are far more selective in choosing ways to store the seeds.

What needs to be worried about those who are new to the term wallet are if someone does not store the seed phrase, this will cause problems for them when used in the future due to the loss of the seeds then the overall loss of control over the wallet to be restored.

We've come across many stories of people who had large amounts of assets invested in their wallets for the long term,, only to find out one day they were shocked to find themselves unable to access them because this often comes down to their negligence in keeping those phrases safe or failing to store an additional backup in a secure location..

For beginners who do not understand the meaning of a wallet and these fundamentals and don't know how to securely store their seed phrases or follow the necessary security measures to protect them from fraud, they should learn and gain experience first. They should also study and conduct research to determine which safe and open-source wallets to use.

I wouldn't advise any beginner to invest even a single dollar before thoroughly understanding everything from the start.

A public key as well is represented as an alphanumeric string , just like the private key. Both are usually displayed in hexadecimal format.


To add to this, if there’s ever a need to ensure that close relatives are aware of your investments in case of unforeseen circumstances, it’s much safer to use a 2-of-3 multisig wallet instead of directly sharing your private key. In such a setup, each participant holds one key, and any transaction will require at least 2 out of 3 signatures. This protects against abuse, prevents a single person from acting alone, and keeps the private key itself uncompromised.

Seed phrase and private key both are key of a wallet. These are a type of key. Whoever has it will be able to access the wallet without any restrictions and will be able to manage funds. Seed phrase can basically be a combination of some words, 12, 15, 24 words, different wallets provide different types of seed phrases. And private key is like public key but slightly different. The seed phrase or private key of a wallet is generated only once and cannot be changed, so you have to be very careful not to let it fall into the hands of someone else.

You have a point about what you said. However, using just an iron steel is also not enough to totally secure the wallet's private information.
I will suggest the use of titanium and stainless steel which are both excellent choices, but if stainless steel is required, make sure it is austenitic steel of grade 316L, which is more suited for maritime applications due to its higher intergranular corrosion resistance, lower carbon content, and greater resistance to sulfuric salt in a situation when there's natura disaster.

Seed phrase and private keys are different but what caugt my attention is that place you said private keys are the same with public keys but are slightly different. They are actually what you said but this is only their raw data, if they are been converted from hexa to thee base58 format, they don't look the same and each of them stand different for different wallets addresse that start with either legacy, p2sh or segwit while private keys has their own imported format which can be compress or not compressed public keys.

You will be surprised that people don't know all this things, you are going to be people don't know why we used different address for different purposes. Till now, there are people that are using legacy wallet address and it's not because they want to, they don't know the difference and since the legacy is what start Bitcoin, they activate it and use there thing without trying their best to know why are we having Bitcoin and which to use for transaction when mempool is less.

You explained it well.  But I'll want to add a little distinction which I think you're missing. a seed phrase is like the “master key” that can regenerate all the private keys of a wallet. A single private key on the other hand, usually corresponds to just one address. That’s why most wallets today encourage users to back up the seed phrase instead because it’s more universal.

Another simple illustration of the two I think is easier to understand when differentiating them is: a private key is like the key to one room in your house while the seed phrase is like the master key to every room. That’s why you'll always hear or read “never share your seed phrase!” from most crypto wallet tutorials because once someone for any reason asseses it, they don’t just enter one room, they can unlock the whole house.

Lastly, we need to understand that both are very sensitive but the seed phrase carries way more weight.

Actually the seed phrase is the basis of the entire wallet and a private key is only associated with one particular address. As long as there is a private key, they only have control over that single address, however, having the seed phrase gives one control over the entire wallet and control over the entire wallet, including all the addresses associated with it. This is why it is the most critical one why the seed phrase needs to be kept very safe and losing it is like losing the whole wallet forever.

It's true but if you know which addresses have bitcoins, you can simply backup private keys of those addresses if you want. Surely it's more easily and even more safely to backup a wallet mnemonic seed words because it's easy to do such wallet backup and I don't see big reasons for don't do this and why a Bitcoin user must skip mnemonic seed words backup to use specific private key backups.

Even Satoshi Nakamoto recommended that Bitcoin users should never delete their wallets.

Private keys and seed phrases matters because they prove you're the true owner of your crypto wallet and funds. Without them you can't access your wallet. It's your responsibility to keep them safe, because you have the full control over them. If you lose your private key and seed phrase and someone else gets access to them, it can lead to permanent loss of your funds. Both should be stored privately, and you shouldn't reveal this information to parents, friends, or anyone else for the safety of your assets, because they might unintentionally or intentionally expose or misuse your security, which may put your assets at risk. To protect your assets, it's crucial to keep this information confidential and secure them at all times.

Since you already know that backing up private keys individually is less convenient and riskier (more prone to typos) than backing up the wallet seed, then I honestly don’t think it’s wise to suggest doing so, especially when we know that many newbies might read your post.
I wouldn’t suggest doing so, not only because it’s riskier and less convenient, but also because of you do that you give up one of the best features of hd wallets, which is enhancing privacy. A hd wallet generates a new address for each receiving transaction and also automatically sends change to a different address than the one you send from..

Private vs seed phrase - what are they and why they matters

Every crypto currency is built on a particular blockchain unknown as they web 3. Unlike in web2 where we usually have a username and a password, it not so in the web3.

The web3 where crypto currency are built always have a wallet address also known as public key for every user. This is where private key and seed phrase comes in;

Private keys are passcode to your wallets or crypto currency. They are unique set of characters(letters and numbers) use to access your wallet. Without them, your account or funds maybe lost forever.

Your seed phrase also unknown as recovery phrase acts as backup option for your wallets. They also help to access your wallet.
Note: either one of them can be used at a time.

Why are they important:
They are important because:
1. They secure your wallet. They can not be easily guessed. It even impossible to guess them. The seed phrase are usually 12 or 24 random words. While the private keys could be up to 64 characters (letters and number mixed together)
2. ⁠They are the only means through which you can access your account.
3. ⁠It also important because getting into a wrong hand means your money can be withdrawn without a trace. Lost.

Remember no one else can manage or control your account or wallet, so once your seedphrase or private key is lost, your account is lost for every. So keep them save so that you can be safe.

If you have a seed phrase, there is no use to back up your private keys. Seed was created for convenience and to have a single back up instead of many private keys. How do you intend to store private keys offline or engrave them on a metal plate? It's not possible that's why with seed phrase, it's human readable and can be engrave on any metallic surface and can be hidden on any location you like, nobody will ever have any access to it unless you tell them.

Been friends with people doesn't mean you have to trust anyone, money brings the inner character of people, you have to be very careful. Don't tell them you have Bitcoin, people have killed each other because they kmow the secrecy of their friends, some have sold each other out because of momey and some have disown each other because of money, not even your family you should entrust with Bitcoin unless you thinkbits necessary due to maybe death concern.

You can do that with private keys, too. You can write them down on a piece of paper or engrave them. Just make sure you don’t make typos, since one wrong character means the loss of your funds.
But that’s not the point here, as you said, why back up private keys when you can just back up the wallet seed!
Backing up private keys was common in the early days of Bitcoin when paper wallets were still a thing. But with the introduction of HD wallets, it’s no longer necessary and doesn’t really make any sense.

There are many methods for making wallet backups and it's recommended to have multiple wallet backups and different backup methods too. Backups need to be tested for wallet recovery to make sure that they are accurate and usable backups before you fund those wallets with your bitcoins.

How to back up a seed phrase? (https://blog.lopp.net/how-to-back-up-a-seed-phrase/)
Crypto Security - Additional Protection For Your Seed/Private Keys. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5230920.0)
[LIST] Bitcoin Seed Backup Tools. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5263482.0)
Metal Bitcoin seed storage reviews. (https://jlopp.github.io/metal-bitcoin-storage-reviews/)

Of course you are right whenever a PC regularly goes online it's not advisable to store our seedphrase there because there is every likelihood to get hacked depending on where those our seedphrase are being stored, especially when it's stored on Microsoft walls. That is, we should stop storing them over such device. Another good way to store our seeds is engraving them on a metal steel plate, this could prevent fire damage or flooding, but in paper you could easily lose them immediately it's wet.

Yes Private keys and seed phrases are most important part of owning crypto. They are our proof that we own our digital money and without them we can not get to our funds. Due to this people in crypto world say Not your keys not your coins because we risk losing our money if we let someone else hold it. To keep our investments safe we must keep this information private and not share it with anyone not even friends or family. Storing them securely and offline is best way to protect our assets from being stolen.

If I lose my seed phrase, is there any way I can get my wallet back? Usually, seed phrases are 12 or 24. If I accidentally lose one of them, is there any way I can get my wallet back?

Seed phrase is very important and we should learn how to keep it safe I remember when I lost my seed phrase when I started cryptocurrency newly, then I had a little amount of cryptocurrency in that wallet but I lost my seed phrase and I could not log in to that wallet anymore, then I wrote the seed phrase in a paper and kept it in my room I don't know who came to my room and take it I just don't know or understand how it got missing I look for it and I could not see it and that was how I lost my first cryptocurrency, keeping our seed phrase safe is something that we should take very serious and as a newbie you need to make sure that you keep it in a place where someone will not reach it because if they reach it they can enter your wallet and then withdraw your money and again I would like to tell every newbie this, if you are doing any AirDrop don't connect the wallet you are using to make bitcoin to those AirDrop because if you connect it they will have access to your wallet and they may withdraw your Bitcoin or from there so be wise.

The simple answer is, 'You can't get your wallet back'. If you properlybqck up your seed phrase on a metal plate, the risk of any accident you can think of is very low to lose the recovery phrase. Your seed phrase are your only way to have access to your Bitcoin, that's why when you create a wallet for the first time, the warnings you get is to make sure you back.uour seed phrase, if you lose them you will forever lose access to any Bitcoin deposit with any wallet address associated with that seed phrase.

The first thing you need to do anytime you create a wallet is to make sure you back the seed phrase, here are some good tips to secure your seed phrase:

Securing your seed phrase with washers - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5389446.0
Seed Backup tools - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5263482.0

This will guide how to properly secure your seed phrase.

The bitcoiners must have plan B. You must not have only 1 backup. You must have at least 2 backups to avoid an unexpected incident. I am stamping mnemonic seed on steel plat, and also write them on another plat and keep it on another place (safe box). So if that main plat broken or something, I have the back up to access my btc.

I also keep the private key on flash disk where I never use it online on my PC.

Plan B can be in many practice from having income from your jobs, having emergency fund to use just in case, storing your bitcoin in different wallets, then making multiple wallet backups. If you don't have many wallets to store your bitcoin, and only store bitcoins in a single wallet, you can lose all bitcoins in a single accident.

Then a next step is your recommendation, making multiple wallet backups in order to have different options for wallet recovery that is important for your bitcoin fund. The initial wallet can have technical or physical issue anytime, and have other backups to use vital.

Nice tip! A hardware wallet is safer for long-term storage, while a computer wallet works for quick access—just keep security in mind!

It would be unwise of a newbie not having knowledge about backing up of seed phrase and private keys.When I got into the cryptocurrency space newly I was told never to disclose my seed phrase to people and not to store them online,and that information got into my brain, that's the reason why newbies should be careful about the information they read online,some information could affect them positively or negatively.
Desiring to know about the security measures on how to keep your holdings safe from scammers it's actually a nice move anyone could take most especially the newbies.Lastly,backup your seed phrase and private keys offline and have duplicates of them incase they got destroyed or lost.

If you lose your seed phrase and you have no additional backup anywhere, then you have lost your funds forever. Your seed phrase is your recovery tool and without it you cannot recover your wallet. It is best to have more than one backup, so if you lose one, you can recover your wallet with the other and move your funds to a new wallet.
With HD wallets there is no need to back up private keys anymore. All you have yo back up is your seed phrase and that's that.

I know how important it is for every bitcoinrr to acquire the knowledge of seed phrases and private keys but I can tell you for free, it's not everyone will be able to learn these things we're talking about because it is not everyone who will have the interest to even learn these things as much as it is encouraged to do so. Some bitcoin users might only end up using bitcoin on centralized exchanges and may not see the need to use these seed phrases or private keys but I can also tell people how important it is because recently I just have a serious challenge with a centralized platform called KuCoin who held my funds in my wallet and could not allow me to withdraw it. It was there and then I understood the importance of decentralized exchanges.

What's free knowledge you shared here, honestly?

It's whether they want to learn or not. If they want to learn, they are surely able to learn it as it is not too hard for learning. Oppositely, if they don't want to learn, it does not mean they are not able to learn.

You said like you are careful and experienced but your story means you were careless and ignored many advice like the others. You ignored warnings, practiced like don't see risk of centralized exchanges before your account gets problems and you struggled to withdraw your fund.

Where did you share your story and problem with Kucoin exchange?
I'd like to read more details on it.

Private keys and Seed phrases are like your whole life in crypto, if you mess with it, you're gone. Protect it just the way you protect your self. In life you won't go to places that are harmful to you, or a place where  you are not comfortable. That's how the private keys and Seed phrases are in this digital asset. Do not keep in any how, you must store it in a place where only you can acces. Never be careless with it, because if a third party see it, they can access your account and withdraw your portfolio from your wallet. Value it the way you value your life, as a beginner the first thing you should be conscious of is how to protect and keep your secrets passwords before you can buy any digital assets.

In the past have lost assets because of my carelessness, till date I lost the wallet,I can't find where I wrote my wallet passwords and I didn't share it with my trusted brother.  Have learnt my lesson, I share my secret seeds with my brother even when it's against the rules. I still find trust in him, if you have a trusted ally you can as well share it with him in case of tomorrow.

Does keeping it in different multiple wallet means storing it in another person smartphone or generating those wallet on the smartphone you are using?, part of the safest way of keeping somebody's Bitcoin is using only one wallet because what storing in different wallet does is that you could easily loss control at any time but if is one your priority will  not be much because the only thing you would be putting your heads on is the safety of that single wallet. Instead of the risk of having other people to have different part of your wallet backup the person should instead use another of his phone to import it so that they would have two phones that is controlling it.

I am reading a lot of bad advice in this thread. Using the same wallet in two different devices doesn't make you any safer, as a matter of fact it makes you more vulnerable to attack, because there are now two points of attack, and if any of them is compromised, the assets will be stolen.
There are no set-in-stone rules, you are your own bank, so you decide what to do with your seed phrase. If sharing it with a loved one is what works for you, then that is fine. There are also bitcoiners that share their seed phrase with their spouses, so it is what it is.

I also think so, I consider Private keys or Seed phrases to be my lifeblood, it might seem strange to some people, but for me, it is real. Imagine if we lost or had our crypto assets, or especially the Bitcoin we own and have saved up was stolen, so we would likely lose our passion for life, or even decide to take our own lives (sorry for that). Furthermore, we can see some news stories regarding this, which could potentially threaten someone life, such as robberies, kidnappings, torture, and even murders (we can find them through search engines or browsers). Therefore, cherish these keys for the safety of our life by protecting them as best as possible.

Here is one of the news: NBCNews.com - Crypto kidnapping (https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/crypto/crypto-kidnapping-bitcoin-price-crime-rcna215047) & CNBC.com - Crypto Theft (https://www.cnbc.com/2025/07/17/crypto-theft-hits-record-in-2025.html)

I understand Antotena’s concerns give that, the alphanumeric coding system of the private key is one that might come by some flaws if one doesn’t keep a keen eye on it and it requires you to write them exactly as it is, where you observe the caps lock as well as small latter words and all,
It’s not the same with the seed phrases, in as much as you keep them in there correct order, they would always allow you access to your wallet.

In both cases, they could be engraved and stored away without any problems.

I no longer handle WIF private keys (for recovery, for example). In short, a single private key recovers only one address, while the recovery seed is responsible for deriving all private keys and addresses associated with the BIP32 root key.

However, you must be very careful about where you store your recovery phrase. If you save it online (such as in Notepad or on a cloud-sharing service), that wallet can be accessed by anyone with access to it. If it's not properly stored in a physical location, someone could find it and either throw it away or steal all the Bitcoin and other crypto alts funds secured by the recovery phrase.

You can add an additional layer of protection like a passphrase, where you can add an additional word that acts as a password to the recovery phrase. Both the recovery phrase (something you have) and the passphrase (something you know) are required to access the wallet's funds. This is only a necessary feature if the user wants to ensure that someone who has found the seed phrase does not have access to the coins (as they would have to know the passphrase as well).

Below I'll leave two articles regarding seed phrases and passphrases that I really like to recommend when I think about these subjects.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Seed_phrase

https://blog.trezor.io/10-common-faqs-around-passphrases-in-trezor-wallets-07f30c7e6a91