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Author Topic: Question about seed phrases  (Read 501 times)
Gimmefive (OP)
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June 23, 2016, 07:53:44 PM
 #1

I'm a very novice bitcoin user, so apologies for the stupid question.

I have a few wallets on my phone, each of which provided a backup seed phrase.  Two questions:

1) If my phone were to explode and I needed to restore my wallet, do I need to use the same wallet?  Or can a seed phrase I got from mycelium be used in electrum if I wanted? 

2) Is there no risk of people just randomly entering 12 word seed phrases in the hopes or recovering an active wallet with funds in it? 

Thanks!
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DannyHamilton
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June 23, 2016, 08:02:40 PM
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1) If my phone were to explode and I needed to restore my wallet, do I need to use the same wallet?  Or can a seed phrase I got from mycelium be used in electrum if I wanted?

That depends on the developers of the wallets.

There are some wallets where the developers have all chosen to use the same word set and seed generating algorithm, there are others that have decided to implement their own method.

As long as the source code for the wallet is publicly available, or the wallet developer has published their word list and algorithm, it should be possible to regenerate the necessary private keys to import into some other wallet. It just might not be very easy to do if there aren't any other compatible wallets already written.

2) Is there no risk of people just randomly entering 12 word seed phrases in the hopes or recovering an active wallet with funds in it? 

For all the well written wallets, the number of possible word phrases for the seed is astronomical.  A properly generated word phrase should be as secure against being "guessed" as a valid bitcoin private key for the given address.
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June 23, 2016, 08:06:43 PM
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I'm a very novice bitcoin user, so apologies for the stupid question.

I have a few wallets on my phone, each of which provided a backup seed phrase.  Two questions:

1) If my phone were to explode and I needed to restore my wallet, do I need to use the same wallet?  Or can a seed phrase I got from mycelium be used in electrum if I wanted? 

2) Is there no risk of people just randomly entering 12 word seed phrases in the hopes or recovering an active wallet with funds in it? 

Thanks!

The seed is used to restore your wallet, so yes you should use the same bitcoin wallet client, i don't have information about the electrum but for mycelium you can restore it. I tried once many times restoring random seeds and was able only once but nothing was there, but in general the chances are very very low.
Gimmefive (OP)
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June 25, 2016, 04:54:37 PM
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Another question, I've always assumed with the seed phrase I'm able to recover all of my account information.  As in if my phone is lost or destroyed I can use the seed phrase to restore my HD account and all the private keys associated with it.  Just want to confirm that this is the case and that I don't need to backup my private keys separately?
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June 25, 2016, 04:58:37 PM
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Another question, I've always assumed with the seed phrase I'm able to recover all of my account information.  As in if my phone is lost or destroyed I can use the seed phrase to restore my HD account and all the private keys associated with it.  Just want to confirm that this is the case and that I don't need to backup my private keys separately?

Yes, the seed is your backup.

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