Bitcoin Forum

This thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5490813.0) sparked a question in my head. Imagine that you are in a situation where you need to dispose of you wallet seed backup, but it is etched on a steel plate - how would you do it? The easiest answer is likely acid, but not everyone has access to it, and depending on the steel plate, it might be even highly resistant to corrosion. Another option is to damage it mechanically - in many of these steel plate products you are supposed to etch the words, so it should be possible to erase them or render unrecognizable. But it's likely hard to do thoroughly and traces of the words could remain.

Any more ideas?

The simplest option is transferring the coins on that wallet seed phrase to a new wallet, this way even if the seed phrase is detected it will be useless to the person in its possession.

The two options mentioned by you are the most practical ones and would be effective. I will go with the second option of mechanical damage that’s using a chisel to put in many random holes in the steel to make it unreadable for any one.

The point exactly, I need not to stress myself and waste yet another penny or effort in buying some chemical or metal work material to destroy whatever have been ached on the steel plate. I’ll just create a brown new non custodian wallet, get my keys properly backed up in a way to get my peace of mind and transfer the coins into the new wallet.

I’d not see no way anyone would be taking my coins after I have successfully transferred them to a new wallet. Perhaps I might even get the metal sold off as scrap metal for the scrap guys.
We’ve got these easily means to navigate and I’ll use it good in this context.

It's not totally useless because it contains your transaction history and you might want it not fall into other's hands. Also there could be situations where it's not an option - you want to destroy just a backup, not the wallet. Imagine you have two backups, one at your current location and another at a remote and safe location. Let's say you are moving from your current location to some new one where you wouldn't keep your steel backup with you because the new place is not safe enough. So you'd want to destroy the backup at your current location, while still relying on the backup at your other safe location.

Yeah I get your point but transactions from an address can still be gotten from explorers excepts that the person needs my address(es) to do so. Also why will someone destroy something which is branded as the best way of keeping a seed phrase back up? To move to another backup? which will be that?

Well it would depend on the type of steel you used whether it’s stainless or not.

But I think both types could easily be melted and when I mean easily melted I mean 3,000 degrees. That melted steel could again be used by other factories. I think you can even get paid for that. However you might feel suspicious of the workers melting your steel plate. You’d just have to wish that the workers don’t care or don’t know about whatever it is that is etched on it.

I don’t know why everyone is suggesting complicated means to destroy the steel plate. Acid is expensive and hard to come by and how will you melt it at 3000C in your home?

All you need to do is take a drill and make a few holes in it and you are done. If the drill breaks it means you got a cheap bit. Buy one of those $5 bits and it will drill thru steel like butter pretty much.

You also don’t need to drill all the way, just enough to destroy what is written on the main surface.

I will do nothing, I do not have to erase or destroy the steel, since I will have move all my funds out of the wallet into a new one, the world is free to have the old recovery seed, I will gladly throw it in a bin, if anyone come across it and they import the seed they will find out that its empty.

Haven't you watch some videos on YouTube where they demonstrate how to create a crypto wallet? They always display the seed, because its for learning purposes only, if you like, go and import the seed, it will be empty anyway.

Why destroy something that's empty? Why spend money on Acid just to destroy a plate that has nothing inside? Abandoned the old steel and throw it out through the window, get a new stainless steel and do your backup.

Another option is to go to the next car repair and borrow an angle grinder for 5 minutes to clear the metal surface of your steel plate or pay a mechanic a couple of bucks to do it for you..

:)

To damage it mechanically seems like the best choice, using acid which can melt your steel plate is probably a dangerous option for those that do not know what they are doing, and melting it with heat seems just as impractical as using acid.

However anyone should have around their home a way to damage that backup to the point no one could recover any information from it, the only issue is that this could take some time, and if you were in a hurry to destroy it you may not be able to do it in time.

To destroy all traces, a steel plate with seedphrases must be thrown into molten metal like the model T-800 :), after emptying the contents of the wallet by sending it to another.


This is the simplest and most reasonable method, but not effective if you want to break the connection with the previous seed-phrase. That is, it will be better if you physically destroy the steel plate.

Take any available power tool (angle grinder, drill and so on - grind and drill sections of plates with seed phrases words) and use it to destroy the text, shredding it and making it impossible to reassemble the text like a puzzle. For the paranoid, I can suggest scattering the crushed parts in different locations.

All this can be done with hand tools if you want to enjoy the duration of the process. :)

Cutting the steel plates into different smaller sizes won't be a bad idea. You can cut it with a cutting machine and and mixed the cut steel plates with cement and sand in a construction site where they are doing floor or pillar casting.

My first thought is melting, but apparently its melting point is just too high for it to be easy to do. That would require special equipment, and can of course also be dangerous to the one doing it because of dealing with molten metal. Since the info is on the plate, grinding is another option, but that also requires special equipment. It looks like it's not something easy to do because steel is made to last. I agree with Zaguru12 that the best option is to transfer the coins and thus get a new seed phrase. And then the old one can go to metal recycling or whatever without any concerns. But I've seen the op's response on why it can still be a bad idea. Well, then one needs to buy an industrial torch or a grinder, then.

If it is your wallet, and you no longer want to use it, nothing is serious.

You can migrate your fund in that wallet to a new wallet. Then abandon that wallet, just throw it away somewhere nobody can know that wallet belongs to you. It will relate to other practices previously like whether you publicly posted your wallet addresses and your identity information.

You can complicate it more by destroy that steel back up but I don't think it is too important and vital for you.

Problems appear only if you still use that wallet for storing your bitcoins but throw the backup away.

Complicate your life, you can read some tests from Jameson Lopp.
https://jlopp.github.io/metal-bitcoin-storage-reviews/
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1poBdHCVrd5eErAWySjSBoKh2f_6VCHsy3ForvL8JCRE/edit#gid=197446072

Stress test https://blog.lopp.net/metal-bitcoin-seed-storage-stress-test/
He has Heat tests and Corrosion tests too.

As suggested earlier the best way is to create a new wallet and transfer the funds there because regardless how we damper if it's not done correctly then there are possibilities of retrieving the seed phrases will be high if it's not erased beyond recognition. Because things like using some chemical or melting is something everyone will it have access hence transferring to new wallet is the easiest way around.

A drill or a pair of metal cutting pliers can easily ruin the seed phrase written on that steel plate. I find that protecting them is really a very difficult task while destroying them is not a difficult problem. Also, if we can engrave words on the steel plate, why don't we try changing some of the words on it? That way, if someone picks up those steel plates they won't have our real seed phrase.

We come up with thousands of ways to keep our seed phrases as safe as possible, and now we find ways to destroy them, which is interesting  ;D.

This may be a good option but it depends on if you have the machine tools to accomplish this. If you don't have the tools, then there will be the problem of trusting the person that will get this done. If the person is dubious, on the process of getting this done, your keys can be memorized and your funds put in danger. I will still go with the option of @Zaguru12.

The steel plate can just be kept at home since steel itself is something of value and there will be no worry if anyone lay hands on it or not because the funds have been moved to another wallet.

 

You can choose to make the steel unrecognisable by mechanical action or further render any inscriptions on it useless by making more inscriptions on the steel if mechanical action to disfigure the steel plate does not work, so that even if it comes the way of someone, they will not be able to make any meaning of it.
This is smart.

You can make it worthless by moving all coins to newly generated seed phrase, but if you want to totally destroy all evidence of transactions than you need to use extreme high temperatures.
Stainless steel melting point is around 1500°C (or 2800°F), so maybe use propane blowtorch (3600 °F), or throw it away in some metal melting factory like the one from Terminator2 movie  :D
Another way if you don't have all those option available, is to stamp over X, # or similar characters over all letters and make it unreadable.
I am not sure what acid is reacting with stainless steel so I would not recommend that method.

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/03/30/Vmff2.jpeg

I read a similar topic here, although it was talking about same steel plates and how it could be navigated through airport security checkpoint scanners and not be discovered. Reasons being it could be captured by someone who knows what it means and thus could be a lead to a hack.
Although, I doubt it would lead to more extreme thoughts, to dispose a seed plate backup shouldn't be much work if you were the one who did the etching in the first place.

The tools you used are already present and am sure by altering the letters of the alphabet, or  by adding just a few etched alphabets to the ones already on there would alter the real pronunciation or spellings of the seed phrases, rendering it meaningless to someone who sees it as a special and customized designer product. Adding crossed lines to the etched words could also alter it making it meaningless too.

This pretty much.  Even easier if you stamped the letters yourself, just stamp more letters over each of them to make it unreadable.

Melting is too complicated.  Though I would argue it is one of the best methods if you do not want some body to find out you own Bitcoin.  This or you drill it and drive 50 miles away from home and throw it into a bin in the middle of a forest, then go back home.

This is because I am more afraid of getting rid of the plate itself than about destroying the Seed so it becomes unreadable.  If no body knows I hold Bitcoin, I would not want them to see the plate.  Even more so if the plate has been drilled.  It could spark some thoughts about your holdings.  Such as, who would put such effort into drilling the plate, unless they hold a lot of Bitcoin?

If its stainless steel you ideally need Cobalt drill bits otherwise with hardened steel
bits it will become very tedious.

I first thought of just stamping more letters over the words but that can be time consuming too.

The quickest way is to just grind off the letters, stick the plate in a vice and grind away
with a grinding disc or a flapper disk, all done in about 10 minutes.

Mechanically destroying the hard drive seems to be the most optimal option to ensure data cannot be recovered. Using acid is potentially dangerous and requires highly specialized knowledge to avoid accidents. In terms of efficiency, thermal fusing is not always recommended, while mechanization can be time consuming but just as effective.

But I think that everyone should equip themselves with a method to safely destroy your backup to ensure that sensitive data is not stolen. This can take time, especially when you need to process large amounts of data, but the security of your information is a top priority.

Transfer all coins to an exchange before transferring it to your new wallet and then you can melt the metal if you have the tools for it. That way, it would look like you bought coins from an exchange to your new wallet and then they won't see the connection of your old wallet with the new one especially if you bought other coins before buying it to bitcoin but I don't think this is good for low amount of coins in my opinion since you will have to pay for the withdrawal fee and such. Try to destroy the letters with grinder.

Why are you talking about hard drives? OP never mentioned any drives at all.  Yes, hard drives also use metal plates for storage, but thats not the point here.

Destroying the hardware itself seems pointless

Your wallet transaction history can be traced regardless of which wallet it is in, because the blockchain itself is a public ledger. If you are that worried about your transaction history, you can always swap your Bitcoin for Monero in a non custodial way and them send them between a couple of other Monero wallets and switch back to Bitcoin and send it to your new wallet. (Although this could make centralized exchanges view your coins with suspicion).

Most people have sanding paper at home. All you really need is a bit of 60 or 80 paper that will cost you a few cents and a few minutes of your time and you can flatten the etched letters enough that nobody will be able to decipher it.
Some honorable mentions?
Drill a hole through. It's enough to destroy a few random signs and it's over. No need to make the whole thing unreadable, you just need to destroy a part of it.
Destroy it using any other tools, like a table grinder, angle grinder, or a dremel tool.
Burn a hole in it using a welding torch.
Easiest and cheapest way? Start grinding it on a concrete pavement and after about 10 minutes of doing so the plate will be unreadable. No tools needed.

If you have one of those metal seed wallets that consist of removable letters or washers that you stamp your words on, you can reuse them by putting in new words or buying clear washers and stamping them again.

No, here I mean backup, not hard drive. Thank you for reminding me of the wrong word.

Throwing in the river is not the best option because they are using magnet fishing nowadays and also some people are purposely diving to recover some lost items. The best option is going to the blacksmith if you have someone you know or someone who buys gold and silvers, I'm sure they have their own machine to burn that steel plate somehow but this is costly and if the person knows about bitcoins, he may take a picture of it before burning it out. the best option is to do it yourself self and if you don't have access to it then just bury it somewhere that you think won't be found out for the next hundred of years.

Yes, this is a very valid idea, and I will definitely go with it since some people cannot easily get access to some non-mechanical equipment to use in destroying the plate. They can easily get access to some harder medals, like hammers, and they can beat the plate heavily and destroy every letter on it. 

I won't do this. I'd rather just destroy the entire steel plate and will do that in my room without someone knowing what I am doing. Although it sounds good but if it's your entire holdings that will be sent to the exchange before you proceed to the destruction of the steel plate, you may have hard time in withdrawing that soon when the exchange tries to ask you some additional requirements. So, melting, totally exerting some force until the metal gets into pieces and throwing it in garbages in several locations might do for me.

Storing a wallet's seed phrase in your system is very cumbersome. Not everyone will be able to have a wallet password with the method you mentioned here because not everyone will be able to engrave steel metal. But I wrote down the proverbs of my wallet in a notebook I kept in a very safe place in my house. If every person wants to keep his wallet seed phrase safe then he can keep it safe. People's wallet seed phrases are stolen only because of the carelessness of users.

So which one is the best option? Make up your mind.  ;)

I agree with your second option, though. Exposing your seed phrase to third parties can never be the best option.

I'm disappointed that almost every other post suggests to just move coins to a new wallet. That's not the solution to what I asked. I specifically asked about a steel plate seed backup, because there could be lots of different situations where you might want to only destroy this specific backup and not moving the coins to a new one.

Imagine that you are traveling abroad and took your steel plate backup with you, and suddenly the situation in the country you are visiting started deteriorating due to war, or coup attempt, or terrorist attack, etc. And there's a lot of security checks all of a sudden and you no longer feel safe carrying your steel plate. But you have another plate in your home country and other backups. So destroying the one you have won't lock you out of your coins. And you can't even securely create a new wallet because you don't have access to an air-gapped PC, only your always-online phone. This is a situation where you'd want to destroy your steel plate.

But even just destroying your physical record of your empty wallet could still be a strong enough reason to want to destroy the seed, so it shouldn't be brushed off by these "just move the coins to a new wallet" replies.

The method is nice, it is your personal decision whether you dispose of the seed backup on a steel plate, but many may find it complicated to save the seed phrase of the wallet. I personally am not able to engrave steel metal, seems too complicated to me. If I do have the help of an outsider to do this, such as someone who is an expert in metal engraving, my wallet is completely vulnerable when the seed phrase will go to him if he is involved in crypto currency. Anyway, I saved my wallet seed phrase in a few steps so that it can be easily accessed in any medium. If you forget to save the wallet seed phrase you can easily lose it, and if you are aware of it you can save it anyway with personal effort.

In that case, not only would it be impossible to securely create a new wallet, but you might not have access to common tools, much less acid, angle grinders or welding equipment. For example, hardware stores and all sorts of other businesses might be closed or out of stock due to looting, emergency hoarding activity etc. Furthermore, the cost of such items could quickly become prohibitive due to runaway inflation of fiat currencies.

Given such obstacles, any workable method for destroying steel backup would have to be tailored to the particularities of the unfolding emergency. For anyone concerned about such a scenario, it might be a good idea to use steel washers instead of a single steel plate for your backup. This way, you would have the option of disposing of each individual washer in a separate location without bothering to erase the information on it. For example, you could toss them one at a time into different parts of a large body of water, or preferably different bodies of water. Or you could discreetly toss the washers into separate waste bins at various locations, so that they end up scattered throughout a landfill or landfills, where it will be all but impossible to retrieve them. If public recycling bins are available, it shouldn't be too difficult to insert the washers into aluminum beverage cans, crumple up the cans so that the washers won't fall out, then toss the cans into the bins. This way you might actually achieve the goal of removing the words from the metal once the cans arrive at the recycling facility, depending on the temperatures used to melt the aluminum (which melts at a lower temperature than steel).

Such an approach may not be as certain as full effacement of the inscribed words, but it would be highly improbable that even a determined adversary would be able to retrieve a sufficient number of the washers to reconstruct the private keys. And the higher the word-count (e.g. a 24-word seed phrase instead of 12), the more difficult such a task would be.

Hammer or use any device that will fold the steel plate until it turns to small piece that is capable to be flush down to your toilet. I guess this is the safest place which no one will dare to recover anything plus it’s located beneath your house.

If ever your septic tank will be siphoned, I doubt that this piece of metal is still recognizable and most of the time those junk recovered from the waste material is being recycled.

Many ideas have already been shared, and I know someone who was looking for options already must have seen an option they like, but since we are still sharing ideas on it, I like to be creative and share another way you could dispose a steel plate seed backup.

Throw it into the sea or the ocean if you stay close to one, it will take a 1000 years before it will be discovered, and even if it is found at the bottom of the sea, it is totally random, and the people who discover it may never have a clue what it is.

Steel is a material that is quite hard and difficult to break, many people will not be able to destroy it on their own. If you bring it to a blacksmith, you just need to directly supervise him doing it and ask the blacksmith to destroy it quickly. I don't think anything too worrying will happen, not everyone knows about bitcoin and no one with a super memory can instantly remember the seed phrases correctly. If it were me, I would talk to the blacksmith and ask him to show me how to destroy it myself, I'd be willing to pay him a higher price .

It will consume your energy and I don't think you will able to fold the steel plate because it's thick and durable. Instead of destroy it, people might become curious when they hear you smashing the steel plate and probably ask what's you doing.

What about sanitation workers who found jewelry? https://www.mccluskeychevrolet.com/blog/gold-found-in-sewage-pawned-by-sanitation-workers/

You can't be really sure someone will not access your wallet when you didn't know the place where all of your backups.

I will bring up the suggestion of using fire to destroy it it one can generate up to the heat temperature required for the sheet to get melted, another perfect means is to go far away, dig the ground and bury it, but erasing them will be a tough task on us because we not not easily achieve doing such, but maybe if there's something called permanent painting or physical destruction if possible depending on the material composition it was made up from. 

   In other for you to dispose your steel plate seed back up, you have to break it into smaller pieces and dispose it at separate locations,also by erasing , shredding and flush off the piece s,since your seed phrase give you access to your crypto account.
 
   If it is not acid resistance one can easily make use of acid to get rid of it permanently for those that are written on metals or any other craving materials should look for industrial tool to erase them ,melt it or cut it off.

Just mail it to me, I'll make sure you got all your coins off.

Seriously, the drill suggestions are the best. You don't even have to totally destroy it if you drill were 12 of the 24 words are and eliminate those your seed is unrecoverable at that point.

I don't know where you are in the world but here in the US a cheap Drill Press is $100 or less and a useful thing to have around anyway.

https://www.harborfreight.com/power-tools/drills-drivers/drill-presses/8-in-5-speed-bench-drill-press-with-light-58780.html

https://www.amazon.com/BERXOL-Benchtop-Portable-Electric-795/dp/B0CHSFN7S4?th=1

*Don't forget eye protection.

-Dave

Yeah, I get that steel is durable, but calling in professional blacksmiths to destroy a seed phrase seems like overkill in my opinion.  There's gotta be easier methods we can use to permanently eliminate those words, right? If you're up for it I think you could probably smash it yourself with just a regular hammer and a hole punch.

Steel Plates were created in order to prevent seed phrases from any kind of damage, so what you are asking for is counter-productive, you shouldn't buy steel plates if you plan to destroy them ever.

Seriously, that's not totally useless, that's the best solution in this case. If you don't want to get tracked, then use a mixer or exchange bitcoins for altcoins, there are many ways to minimize tracking and improve privacy or use paper wallet and it will be over.

Long story short, use metal seeds if you don't plan to destroy them or if you think you'll have a moment when it will be necessary to destroy seeds, use a paper wallet or any different method with the possibility of destruction.

I don't believe that situation will come to destroy your seed phrase, which is on a steel plate. But if such a situation comes up and I need to destroy it totally, then I would make it into many pieces by cutting it through a grinder or something else and through different places. But for a better solution, just don't use it after making it empty. But everything depends on the situation and timing. Each case will have a different solution. I hope that situation will not come to me, and I don't use steel plates to write seed phrases.  

Sounds like a lot of work, I think there's someone who already suggesting about melting the metal plate by heating it up to the point that the metal will turn to red, in that way you can Platten the plate and erase the seed phrase that is written there.
but you can make it easier by changing your wallet, I mean make another wallet and transfer your funds there in that way even someone can access that seed phrase and manage to open it, they will get nothing at all, but the thing is it sounds funny that someone really make their seed phrase backup written in a steel plate that is some a hard back up storage there haha.

Angle grinder if you got access to one. Otherwise, you'd need to make a makeshift kiln

I think it depends on the type of steel you use because there will be some fastidious people who will definitely use good steel and destroying them will take a lot of effort. But I agree with you that if someone is smart enough, destroying them is not difficult, preserving and keeping them safe is the problem, but destroying them is ten times easier.

Through this story, we realize that every method has advantages and disadvantages, there is no such thing as absolute perfection. From the beginning, we spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to store our seed phrase, and now we're looking to destroy it. LOL.

It's hard if you are not into those mechanical stuffs and then you lack in the right tools but we can always call the help of someone else who are expert on it and I think we will know if those people are into crypto or not and if they are trusted to not steal our coins.

We can also do some measures to prevent them from doing that because it may be hard for us to know their true identity completely. Another safer and easier option (though may not really be cheap) is to simply buy a same type of wallet or seed purse. I already saw a couple of those before. When creating a wallet we are always required to write them down because memorizing them may not be easy and even if we do for a while, there's still a high chance that we can forgot them later on.