How do you keep your mnemonic phrases?

[blockman]

But how you will identify it if you are about to retrieve the wallet? You have to put some hint of doing this. This came to my mind but I'm very easy to forget and my memory doesn't works well now.

The "story" part gave me an idea. Maybe it can be encrypted into a poem that can be then memorized. Would be longer but seems easier to memorize than a random sequence of words. Thanks for the suggestion.

Wooah I remember someone suggested and created this type of encryption to his private key. Making a story with the use of your private keys will give confusion if someone accidentally sees your PK's. Thanks for reminding me about this type of sequence and the story thing.  This is familiar to me and it's a good way to protect it that way, you don't have to memorize it you only need some hints on what are the most important words.

Mnemonic is an unencrypted private key. If it's discover by unauthorized parties, then they can have complete access to it. The following are the key points to remember.

1. Back up mnemonic immediately, when you create a wallet in imToken
2. Copy mnemonic on a piece of paper, don't use screenshots.
3. Ensure the mnemonic is correct, you can check out by Myetherwallet.
4. Keep your mnemonic safe when you save it.

Anyone who discovers the phrase can steal the bitcoins, so it must be kept safe like cash. Never type it on a website.

You miss our little discussion. Before telling us on what we should you at least read on what we are talking about the encryption thing and by the way of hiding PK's through making a "story" type which is composed of those words. Maybe you just misquote our conversion mate but we are on bitcoin discussion and MEW is an altcoin so you better put that piece of advice on the Altcoin Discussion if someone asks on how he can keep his mnemonic phrases on MEW.

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[Commie]

Here's a total paranoid way of storing it. It was (and probably still is) used a lot for message coding by intelligence services of many countries, so old, but still effective.
Take a book. Any book you like.
Find all the words your mnemonic phrase contains.
Mark their location using page-paragraph-word number combination, ie 120826 would mean page 12, paragraph 8, word 26.
As a result you will have a series of 6 digit numbers which you are free to store on your Google drive, email to yourself or paint on your roof Without knowing what the key book is no one will be able to decipher it.

[merchantofzeny]

But how you will identify it if you are about to retrieve the wallet? You have to put some hint of doing this. This came to my mind but I'm very easy to forget and my memory doesn't works well now.

The "story" part gave me an idea. Maybe it can be encrypted into a poem that can be then memorized. Would be longer but seems easier to memorize than a random sequence of words. Thanks for the suggestion.

Wooah I remember someone suggested and created this type of encryption to his private key. Making a story with the use of your private keys will give confusion if someone accidentally sees your PK's. Thanks for reminding me about this type of sequence and the story thing.  This is familiar to me and it's a good way to protect it that way, you don't have to memorize it you only need some hints on what are the most important words.

Yeah, I'm thinking along the lines of a number sequence you can easily remember (special dates, etc) and using that as key to extract the words form the sentence. Am starting to read up on cryptography now. Interesting stuff.

Here's a total paranoid way of storing it. It was (and probably still is) used a lot for message coding by intelligence services of many countries, so old, but still effective.
Take a book. Any book you like.
Find all the words your mnemonic phrase contains.
Mark their location using page-paragraph-word number combination, ie 120826 would mean page 12, paragraph 8, word 26.
As a result you will have a series of 6 digit numbers which you are free to store on your Google drive, email to yourself or paint on your roof Without knowing what the key book is no one will be able to decipher it.

That's quite cool. I think the good thing about is is that you can use any book, there's less danger of you losing it since many books are available online, you can just download them if you lost your physical copy and then just do a pen-and-paper solving.

You mentioning books reminded me of a technique I saw in a Kdrama. To decipher the number sequence, basically the content of the book is written on a grid. The number are actually pairs showing the coordinates in the grid so they'd spell out the words. I suppose the hard part is keeping the sequence. Most people are not that good a remembering strings of numbers.

[Commie]

But how you will identify it if you are about to retrieve the wallet? You have to put some hint of doing this. This came to my mind but I'm very easy to forget and my memory doesn't works well now.

The "story" part gave me an idea. Maybe it can be encrypted into a poem that can be then memorized. Would be longer but seems easier to memorize than a random sequence of words. Thanks for the suggestion.

Wooah I remember someone suggested and created this type of encryption to his private key. Making a story with the use of your private keys will give confusion if someone accidentally sees your PK's. Thanks for reminding me about this type of sequence and the story thing.  This is familiar to me and it's a good way to protect it that way, you don't have to memorize it you only need some hints on what are the most important words.

Yeah, I'm thinking along the lines of a number sequence you can easily remember (special dates, etc) and using that as key to extract the words form the sentence. Am starting to read up on cryptography now. Interesting stuff.

Here's a total paranoid way of storing it. It was (and probably still is) used a lot for message coding by intelligence services of many countries, so old, but still effective.
Take a book. Any book you like.
Find all the words your mnemonic phrase contains.
Mark their location using page-paragraph-word number combination, ie 120826 would mean page 12, paragraph 8, word 26.
As a result you will have a series of 6 digit numbers which you are free to store on your Google drive, email to yourself or paint on your roof Without knowing what the key book is no one will be able to decipher it.

That's quite cool. I think the good thing about is is that you can use any book, there's less danger of you losing it since many books are available online, you can just download them if you lost your physical copy and then just do a pen-and-paper solving.

You mentioning books reminded me of a technique I saw in a Kdrama. To decipher the number sequence, basically the content of the book is written on a grid. The number are actually pairs showing the coordinates in the grid so they'd spell out the words. I suppose the hard part is keeping the sequence. Most people are not that good a remembering strings of numbers.

I think this is over the top. I've never seen a book printed on a grid, so I presume you'd have to do that yourself, too. Why bother? Keep things simple.

[blockman]

But how you will identify it if you are about to retrieve the wallet? You have to put some hint of doing this. This came to my mind but I'm very easy to forget and my memory doesn't works well now.

The "story" part gave me an idea. Maybe it can be encrypted into a poem that can be then memorized. Would be longer but seems easier to memorize than a random sequence of words. Thanks for the suggestion.

Wooah I remember someone suggested and created this type of encryption to his private key. Making a story with the use of your private keys will give confusion if someone accidentally sees your PK's. Thanks for reminding me about this type of sequence and the story thing.  This is familiar to me and it's a good way to protect it that way, you don't have to memorize it you only need some hints on what are the most important words.

Yeah, I'm thinking along the lines of a number sequence you can easily remember (special dates, etc) and using that as key to extract the words form the sentence. Am starting to read up on cryptography now. Interesting stuff.

Good luck about that mate and give us your little update if you are done with it.

I think this is over the top. I've never seen a book printed on a grid, so I presume you'd have to do that yourself, too.

He has to do it alone and it's DIY security.

Why bother? Keep things simple.

Things that are simple can easily caught up if there is someone that's trying to breach your keys out.

[Commie]

Things that are simple can easily caught up if there is someone that's trying to breach your keys out.

Especially when that someone is using a simple baseball bat to get them from you LOL.
Jokes aside though, the method I have described above is about as simple as it may get and very secure.

[Cinazhang]

from wikipedia:
most people write down phrases on paper but they can be stored in many other ways such as memorizing, engraving on metal, writing in the margins of a book, chiseling into a stone tablet or any other creative and inventive way.

For storing on paper writing with pencil is much better than pen[4]. Paper should be acid-free or archival paper, and stored in the dark avoiding extremes of heat and moisture

Some people get the idea to split up their phrases. Storing 6 words in one location and the other 6 words in another location. This is a bad idea and should not be done, because if one set of 6 words is discovered then it becomes easier to bruteforce the rest of the phrase. Storing bitcoins in multiple locations like this should be done via multisignature wallets instead.

Another bad idea is to add random decoy words that are somehow meaningful to you, and later remove them to be left only with the 12 word phrase. The phrase words come from a known dictionary (see next section), so anybody can use that dictionary to weed out the decoy words.

It could be a good idea to write some words of explanation on the same paper as the mnemonic phrase.

[devonneburger7]

Here's a total paranoid way of storing it. It was (and probably still is) used a lot for message coding by intelligence services of many countries, so old, but still effective.
Take a book. Any book you like.
Find all the words your mnemonic phrase contains.
Mark their location using page-paragraph-word number combination, ie 120826 would mean page 12, paragraph 8, word 26.
As a result you will have a series of 6 digit numbers which you are free to store on your Google drive, email to yourself or paint on your roof Without knowing what the key book is no one will be able to decipher it.

I think think this was one of the best ideas so far. Distributed and fault tolerant.

[bob123]

Take a book. Any book you like.
Find all the words your mnemonic phrase contains.
Mark their location using page-paragraph-word number combination, ie 120826 would mean page 12, paragraph 8, word 26.
As a result you will have a series of 6 digit numbers which you are free to store on your Google drive, email to yourself or paint on your roof Without knowing what the key book is no one will be able to decipher it.

This may sound like a idiot-proof concept, but is in reality relatively vulnerable.
If someone gains access to your google drive (or to your roof  ) and knows the system you have used to substitute your words, it just takes a few minutes to hours to test all books which might have been used.
Anyone in your locality who might be able to guess what you are into, is able to check the words from a few thousand books similar to what you are interested in.

While this might work out if you hide all possible information (Substitution, book used, etc.. ), Security by obscurity is a bad approach.

[devonneburger7]

Take a book. Any book you like.
Find all the words your mnemonic phrase contains.
Mark their location using page-paragraph-word number combination, ie 120826 would mean page 12, paragraph 8, word 26.
As a result you will have a series of 6 digit numbers which you are free to store on your Google drive, email to yourself or paint on your roof Without knowing what the key book is no one will be able to decipher it.

This may sound like a idiot-proof concept, but is in reality relatively vulnerable.
If someone gains access to your google drive (or to your roof  ) and knows the system you have used to substitute your words, it just takes a few minutes to hours to test all books which might have been used.
Anyone in your locality who might be able to guess what you are into, is able to check the words from a few thousand books similar to what you are interested in.

While this might work out if you hide all possible information (Substitution, book used, etc.. ), Security by obscurity is a bad approach.

You don't have to use your favourite book, you only need to remember which book you used. I think this is less vulnerable than any digital methods used at the moment.

[Theb]

Has anybody here think of jumbling the position of certain phrases as a good idea? If you are thinking of keeping your seed in your closet or drawer then this might be a good idea even if someone obtained your seed they won't be able to access your wallet as it is all jumbled up.

For example:
You will write and switch the 12th word and the 1st word's position
You will write and switch the 6th word in the the 3rd word's position

Or for your own liking you can switch the words between the words you want to switch, the tricky part here is on how you will remember their positions. Because even I myself won't trust remembering their positions mentally, writing their positions somewhere might also work, you can even right their positions online as long as you keep the whole seed to yourself.

[veleten]

Since other posters already suggested good ideas, I'd like to share one sort of "unorthodox" way of storing your mnemonic phrases.

Memorize it. Yes, you heard that right. A 12-word recovery seed is a lot easier to memorize that most people thought(though memorizing 24-word seed is still possible, just significantly harder). But I understand that this is definitely not for everyone.

this one,along with the google doc storage are the worst IMHO
both run the risk of losing access too easily
I have a very good memory,yet I stumble upon sites or accounts I created several years ago and passes for which I was supposed to rememeber
many I do,but there were a couple of frustrating episodes where I could not no matter how I tried
besides you can be injured (god forbid),suffer from a temporary amnesia etc.
you would not want your savings to be gone forever in this case

[blockman]

Things that are simple can easily caught up if there is someone that's trying to breach your keys out.

Especially when that someone is using a simple baseball bat to get them from you LOL.
Jokes aside though, the method I have described above is about as simple as it may get and very secure.

Not just a baseball bat but also a gun?
https://themerkle.com/bitcoin-seeking-gangsters-hold-cryptocurrency-trader-at-gunpoint-in-his-own-home/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/28/britains-first-bitcoin-heist-trader-forced-gunpoint-transfer/

[Fatunad]

Things that are simple can easily caught up if there is someone that's trying to breach your keys out.

Especially when that someone is using a simple baseball bat to get them from you LOL.
Jokes aside though, the method I have described above is about as simple as it may get and very secure.

Not just a baseball bat but also a gun?
https://themerkle.com/bitcoin-seeking-gangsters-hold-cryptocurrency-trader-at-gunpoint-in-his-own-home/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/28/britains-first-bitcoin-heist-trader-forced-gunpoint-transfer/

Its really a worrying thing but only to those people who holds up huge amounts into their own stashes. Therefore we should really remain silent on what we possess. Dont expose or do create awareness publicly because once criminal minds will able to know then your life is at risk.You might able to avoid online hackers but you would really be prone into physical harm. On my side i do store up my mnemonic phrases on a notepad and then save it on a USB into 3 copies or files. Then store it up into places which someone in the house didnt know where i do placed it.

[veleten]

you can show your kid how it is working and even teach him how to use Nano or Trezor (doubt a 7-year old would grasp it all,tbh)
but I would rather keep my coins in a paper wallet in a secure place
then trust everything even to the safest of the hardware wallet
especially after I have explained to my underage kid how it is working and that it contains alot of money

[xyz_abc_def]

If you have a couple of Raspberry Pi's that you never go online with store it there. Preferably on more than one device so if one device fails you have a backup

[blockman]

Things that are simple can easily caught up if there is someone that's trying to breach your keys out.

Especially when that someone is using a simple baseball bat to get them from you LOL.
Jokes aside though, the method I have described above is about as simple as it may get and very secure.

Not just a baseball bat but also a gun?
https://themerkle.com/bitcoin-seeking-gangsters-hold-cryptocurrency-trader-at-gunpoint-in-his-own-home/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/28/britains-first-bitcoin-heist-trader-forced-gunpoint-transfer/

Its really a worrying thing but only to those people who holds up huge amounts into their own stashes. Therefore we should really remain silent on what we possess. Dont expose or do create awareness publicly because once criminal minds will able to know then your life is at risk.You might able to avoid online hackers but you would really be prone into physical harm. On my side i do store up my mnemonic phrases on a notepad and then save it on a USB into 3 copies or files. Then store it up into places which someone in the house didnt know where i do placed it.

Yes keeping silent and remaining to be a low key holder will suit everyone to protect yourself from such incidents like the links that I posted.

This is why crypto's are anonymous because it helps us to hide on how much we are holding and that makes you remain low key by not letting someone know it.

Don't be too boastful with your holdings -- this kind off topic, I'll leave.

[The best one]

OK, this would sound noobish but I'm interested to know how other people keep the mnemonic phrase generated by the wallet. I do have the wallets secured with a pw and backed up (still not enough to warrant a hardware wallet) but I also have the passphrases handwritten in paper (someone said be wary of printers) and stashed somewhere but I'm wondering if there's a better way to keep them.

I don't know any cryptography but I'm thinking of shuffling the words rather than writing them down in order. Like a 12x12 grid where I'd spread them out in certain patterns and then finished with filler words. Since it's no longer as straight-forward should anyone get their hands on it, I think it would finally be safer to keep digital copies of it. Any suggestions?

My opinion about how do I keep my mnemonic phrases due to save my personality data for example : password, login username and mnemonic phrases I have made in document google and all my data I save in it so If I want to open or login  this data I use secret  code so all my data is safety.

[f3tus]

Seedshift - Encrypt/decrypt your BIP-39 seed words with a date shift cipher: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3416202

[Commie]

Anyone in your locality who might be able to guess what you are into, is able to check the words from a few thousand books similar to what you are interested in.

It was effective long before us and still is very effective. Where would you be searching for those books, on the internet? Are you aware that various paper editions have different font and different paging? In other words, good luck with the search