Bitcoin Forum

(Keep Your Recovery Seed Safe And Secure) It is the first lesson you learn when using cryptocurrencies, but you will its value when you lose your currencies.
I keep most of my BTC in cold storage and transfer a small part to my phone to make payments. Yesterday, I transferred about $ 50. Unfortunately, my phone fell from the top of the house and Android stopped working.
I didn't keep any save any recovery seed, so I lost it forever. :D

Don't be like me, keep your wallet seed save.

Read: Do’s and Don’ts of Keeping Your Recovery Seed Safe (https://blog.trezor.io/https-blog-trezor-io-keep-your-seed-phrase-away-from-lions-edcc105457a0)
Use: https://buybitcoinww.co/Billfodl or https://cryptosteel.com/

Luckily not a costly mistake (even though $50 means a lot in some countries), but every wallet, no matter what type it is, should have a backup. You, as an experienced member, should have known this very well and did not rely on a device that was physically damaged in this case, but could also have been stolen or otherwise damaged.

However, while it may seem that the data has been lost forever, there is a chance that you can save it. There are several methods you can try, and everything what is free and you can do it, it's worth the try. Of course, it all depends on the degree of damage, I hope the smartphone did not break into small pieces.

https://www.cryptopal.com/how-to-recover-data-from-broken-android-phone/

All wallets, even mobiles, force you to save the seed somewhere to create the wallet.
They give you the 12/24 words and ask for the correct order. At least all wallets I ever used asked this of me. It is impossible to create a wallet if you don't note down the words in the correct orders, as you will need to order them.

Maybe your wallet had a "skip" button?

Anyway, just not it down in a .txt file if it is a very small amount and you don't care about its security. Better to have a low security back up than no back up at all.

There's no option of skipping seed key other than writing however, it's possible to create wallet without writing it anywhere. You can use the screenshot option for rewriting the seed key which I had done when I was noob. But now I'm not doing that amymore because it's very risky to save seed on electronic device.
Most of the newbies intentionally or unintentionally do this mistake more often. Saving seed or privkey in electronic device is very bad practice and saving it on phone is more riskier because phone can anytime get damaged which may not be recovered.

Maybe OP wrote down seeds and use it to finish wallet setup. After the setup was done, OP thrown away what he wrote down. Today, unfortunately he lost his fund ($50) in that wallet, forever. Maybe someday later, he found that piece of paper or that file and get his amount of bitcoin back. Who knows, that day those bitcoin will worth $1000.

As the saying goes "not your key, not your bitcoin". Personal experience shared by the OP is one concrete example that storing bitcoin or other cryptocurrency assets on mobile is very risky if we do not have seed reserves that we have moved or put in safer locations.

I also often use cellphones to make transactions and so far I have some tips that I have done to secure or return my wallet if something bad happens like a cell phone falling or damaged. Besides backing up my wallet and seeds, I also copied them and printed them on paper and placed them in my closet. This small step may be an effort to prevent us from losing access to the wallet that is used to store or carry out transactions on mobile phones, very easily and efficiently. IMO

This attractive topic reminds me that I have that one, Newbies - Read before using exchanges or investing (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5178747.0). I will quote only the section that relates to the OP's lesson.

Always backup, verify backup before storing funds in wallets.

Oh boy I do this a lot. With my cold storage, I'm pretty much maximum-level paranoid. Like checking checking every week if my mnemonic phrase paper is still in my hidden location or not. But with my hot wallet? Pfft whatever. I personally wouldn't dare to send more than $30 on my hot wallet though.

And just to add: always keep a copy of your seed, but NOT on your computer. I couldn't count how much Reddit posts I've seen about people losing their funds and blaming Ledger even though they just saved their backup on a .txt file on their personal computer.

Just to add a minor point too. Don't store backups on cloud-service accounts. If you do that, you totally rely on service's reliability and security. It is very bad and risky.

Most of my funds are in cold storage as well but I also use a few software wallets and Coinomi for my Android phone. But all seeds and private keys are written down my hand in hidden. In case my phone breaks I have a backup of the seed. Too bad you didn't and you dropped your phone. Losing any amount sucks particularly when it could have been prevented. I hope those $50 don't mean that much to you.   

The phone costs about $ 800. I brought up this topic because some people think they are safe as long as their phone is working and they have the password/fingerprint.

I wrote it, but I think I put the paper somewhere. The extra sense of security about phone protection is what made me ignore the simplest rules. Perhaps because the sums are small.

I hope that. will buy a new phone  :P

Unfortunately, I relied on an Air Gapped PC for this task, but I have a lot of protected copy using cryptosteel and other recovery tools.

Really it's an old lesson but sometimes we make mistake due to laziness.

Hi!
There is a premise that many do not understand, of course I do not think it is their case. But his accident is example to demonstrate that one of the best utilities of cryptocurrencies that is to dispose of your assets whenever and wherever you want, is ignored by a large majority of users for the simple reason of following old schemes.

We must understand that our balance or funds are "cash" where you write the Private Key. The Wallets are the mirror of our funds.
The first way to protect the Private Key is a simple sheet of paper.

Regards.

It truly is a shame that there are wallets out there allowing you to use them without first backing up AND verifying your seed. Although I've been using cryptocurrencies for many years and have plenty of experience, I also still skip the most important part of using a wallet especially when I know I'm only going to use it for a very short period of time.

But what if you have to send $1k, you load the short-term wallet and exactly at that moment your phone goes into a bootloop?

I've lost my password to an online wallet before without saving my seed. You don't want to know how it feels to be able to see your balance but not to spend it without the password youll never recover again.

Back it up. Take these minutes to back up your seed, you'll be thankful if this ever happens to you.


Damn it! I wanted to post initially a reply specifically to ask whether the phone storage could be saved but apparently I forgot. Meanwhile, someone else was faster.. :D

Yes, chances are such services could cost him more than the $50 worth of Bitcoin he kept in his wallet. I don't believe a professional service would charge less than $100/200. But one should also consider that those $50 worth of Bitcoin could turn out to be worth much more than that if and when the market recovers and goes for another bull run. Keep that option in mind.

To lose the seed is one way to lose your coins with the phone, but in some scenarios when people lose the phone, they lose the 2FA access and with that they lose access to their coins in localbitcoins or others services who ask for 2FA.

Like people used to say, not your keys, not your coins.

Happened to me. The samsung phone getting hotter after installing an app and it breaks after days, the android wallets I installed were there and some of the coins I earned. I kept some of the seed written in post-it though so its quite safe. Its just going to take a lot of troubles to go thru recovering the wallets with private keys. The phone wallets prevent users to take a screenshot actually which is why I have to copy the seeds and privatekeys.

You are right our phone is not forever so we need to have backups, I bought my phone 4 years ago and just recently I experience an unplanned restart my phone just keep restarting maybe its lifespan is near. I guess not just seed phrase all important files on our phone should be backup like 2FA codes, etc. But of course, our wallets come first. I am planning to buy 2 new phones just in case of unexpected happenings.

This seems a bit too unnecessary lol. Why mobile phones for coin storage in the first place? If I personally would buy backup wallet devices, it would be 2 Ledger Nano S'.

BTW, is the phone got hardly crashed?

Technicians today can find a way to boot it up without harming the saved apps or basically without clearing the data. I'm an Android enthusiast for years both software and hardware but I don't know that's possible since it should be reset.

I do have a phone before that fell on the 3rd floor (maybe about 15ft). It was basically crash but not the internal stuff of it. If only it got booted but stuck to the Android logo, I can manage to fix just by flashing a stock ROM but that's not the case. I want it to be repaired as it was just 2 months in my possession and it got fixed by a CP technician. The apps are still there when it booted. Although it costs me around $60 (in my currency) since they also replaced the LCD and battery.

That's true. That's the reason many big wallets stored into different things were, at first, sent to some wrong places mistakenly (like that HDD the guy threw out thinking it was holding trash). If he'd have kept the seed itself, he'd have been able to move out his 7k BTC and sell them today which is worth millions of $$$. I've seen some cases too where privkeys get stolen and everything, if kept in a single address, gets compromised which is why I recommend HD wallets with in-built ability to get you a new address every time you transact, and also asks you to save your wallet seed at the very beginning.

In this case, the damage is actually higher because of the price of the device itself than what is contained in it. But as I wrote before, it may be possible to save the data or you may find your backup - that $50 may not seem like much today, but it may one day reach the price of the device itself.

We should not rely on a fingerprint or face unlock on smartphones as the ultimate protection, because while we sleep or if we are in any unconscious state (under the influence of alcohol, drugs ...) it is very easy to unlock our device and steal data (if they are not encrypted).