The Ultimate Seed Phrase Security: MEMORIZATION

[nakamura12]

An accident can cause someone to forget the password so it's not the best way or in your own words the ultimate seed phrase security which is not. If you want a strong backup of your seed phrase then you can use metal plates or use other metal that are more cheaper. If you read many threads, there's no one recommending doing this because it is not really safe. If you feel confident yourself then you should do it and tell us the time you have been doing it and I am sure you will regret it sooner or later.

[Richbased]

When i saw the subject ''The Ultimate Seed Phrase Security: MEMORIZATION'', i was literally thinking it was a new invention of how to store seed phrase not knowing it was about storing some shit in the brain but all thanks to @Cricktor who rephrased the heading to (Sole) MEMORIZATION: the ultimate recipe for desaster!, this method of storing seed phrase is sure a disaster because of unforeseen circumstances that may occur to your brain in the future. We are in a modern age now so we shouldn't consider some outdated kinda way to save vital security information.

[Kelward]

Memorizing your seed phrase can be one of the options for saving it but like many people I believe that it's not the best option. I read somewhere that the shortest pencil is better than the biggest brains, it means that we're humans and we can forget, also if sudden death or lose of memory happens our loved ones can't have access to our BTC. Secure your seed phrase in different safe locations which can include memorizing it but never make the mistake of hiding your seed phrase on your brains alone, if anything happens to your memory it's gone forever. As someone gets older there is high chances of forgetting things so don't depend on memory alone to hide your seed phrase for the long term.

[K_vin]

This was the reason I lost my first wallet 2017, a very painful experience after I lost my phone and tried to recall my seed phrase on my new device and found out I had forgotten about 2 words,. Please memorising cannot be relied on because even if you don't forget the words per say, you may forget the word arrangement,the spelling of some words and sometimes there are synonymous and acronyms,. Why memorising is good it should just be a temporal source and there should be other places where your words are saved so that when memory fails you can fall back to the other sources..

[MusaMohamed]

When i saw the subject ''The Ultimate Seed Phrase Security: MEMORIZATION'', i was literally thinking it was a new invention of how to store seed phrase not knowing it was about storing some shit in the brain

The title says about the backup method, it's not too confusing.

Memorizing your seed phrase can be one of the options for saving it but like many people I believe that it's not the best option. I read somewhere that the shortest pencil is better than the biggest brains, it means that we're humans and we can forget, also if sudden death or lose of memory happens our loved ones can't have access to our BTC.

It's a dangerous method and it's not recommended.

You can be Albert Einstein with one of best brains in human history, but an accident can take your memory away and you will lose your bitcoin when your memory no longer helps you to recover your Bitcoin wallet. That's how this backup method is very risky and need to be avoided as most as you can.

How to Back up a seed phrase?

[apogio]

How to Back up a seed phrase?

Very good guide indeed.

I wanna add, since you proposed it, that most of the time people worry about the wrong things.
They pay $100 for a reputable physical medium backup, but they store it in unsafe places.
They pay for a trusted cloud storage to store their seed phrases there, but they don't pay money to buy a hardware device or an old laptop to use for air-gapped transactions.

[satscraper]

OP has to change the emphasis in his topic putting  MEMORIZATION  as the worst security for SEED phrase rather than ultimate one. Why is this - all said by others respondents in his topic.

If yuo wanna the ultimate security reap the fruit from this topic. The method described there allowed me to disseminate literally  all over the world   the stuff keeping  my SEED and not to be bothered about its security.

[Z-tight]

When you're used to tending to your garden, there's not much to alert the neighbors. It's true that American-style gardens (like the ones I see in the TV series), which have no fences and are visible to all, aren't very conducive to this kind of DIY. But how do you protect your seed from a fire like the one we saw in California? You advise people to put seeds in different places, but where and how?

For people who have a summer or vacation home, it would be easier for them to store their seed phrase in different locations, but i know that not many people can afford that. However, engraving your seed phrase on stainless steel can also protect it from some kind of natural disaster.

Everyone should do what they think is best for their funds, but they must ensure that they do not compromise on security in the process, because in trying to protect yourself from a natural disaster, you may complicate things and lose your funds and never get hit by any of such disasters you were avoiding.

[Cricktor]

This was the reason I lost my first wallet 2017, a very painful experience after I lost my phone and tried to recall my seed phrase on my new device and found out I had forgotten about 2 words,.

It shouldn't be a big problem to find two or three missing words from 12 to 24 mnemonic recovery words, especially when you know some public addresses of your wallet and even better when you know their exact full derivation path. I wouldn't consider such a wallet as lost, judging from very preliminary details here.

Why didn't you properly document your mnemonic recovery words on paper and/or metal in the first place? It makes no sense to try to memorize them for long term "storage". This will inevitably fail, almost guaranteed.


Post edit: fixed my subject title

[Smartprofit]

The forum has repeatedly published stories of users who lost access to their bitcoins. In most cases, this was due to the fact that they forgot important information about private keys or seeds. People often tend to overestimate the ability to remember various information.

In addition, this ability is affected by various circumstances. For example, the coronavirus covid-19 virus has a very negative effect on human cognitive abilities. As a result, a person can begin to forget the most basic things.

A person can face many force majeure circumstances - illnesses, head injuries, mental damage, etc. All this can lead to the fact that he will forget information about private keys and lose access to his Bitcoins.

Therefore, in my opinion, it is advisable to create a reliable system for storing private keys (seed), without relying on the fact that this information can be remembered.

[Jawhead999]

Nah, memorization can't be the solution.

It requires dedication to remember it everyday, if you didn't try to remember it, you might forget some of the words. Just like I have password on my accounts, but I forget it after next few months or years.

Don't completely rely on your brain, you need something that you can trust, back up on steel plate is the best option.

[retreat]

It is a bad idea to use memorization as a way to memorize your seed phrase. Human memory is not strong - it can be wrong or you will forget important words from the seed phrase and you will ruin the whole thing. There is no better way to use other media that is stronger and more durable, such as stainless steel, you can carve your seed phrase there and keep it in a safe place. This method can be much better than just relying on memory alone.

[K_vin]

This was the reason I lost my first wallet 2017, a very painful experience after I lost my phone and tried to recall my seed phrase on my new device and found out I had forgotten about 2 words,.

It shouldn't be a big problem to find two or three missing words from 12 to 24 mnemonic recovery words, especially when you know some public addresses of your wallet and even better when you know their exact full derivation path. I wouldn't consider such a wallet as lost, judging from very preliminary details here.

Why didn't you properly document your mnemonic recovery words on paper and/or metal in the first place? It makes no sense to try to memorize them for long term "storage". This will inevitably fail, almost guaranteed.

With one or two words forgotten a wallet is as good as lost especially for newbies who are not familiar with seed phrases nd tried to rely on their brain not documenting it anywhere maybe because they weren't thought or they felt they could rely on their ability to recall which was my experience then
 So when sensitive things like these are being talked about we must put everyone one into perspective and consideration since there are people of all categories here( experience and age wise)
However are both saying the same thing sir, your last paragraph is my whole point......

[JayJuanGee]

The forum has repeatedly published stories of users who lost access to their bitcoins. In most cases, this was due to the fact that they forgot important information about private keys or seeds. People often tend to overestimate the ability to remember various information.

In addition, this ability is affected by various circumstances. For example, the coronavirus covid-19 virus has a very negative effect on human cognitive abilities. As a result, a person can begin to forget the most basic things.

A person can face many force majeure circumstances - illnesses, head injuries, mental damage, etc. All this can lead to the fact that he will forget information about private keys and lose access to his Bitcoins.

Therefore, in my opinion, it is advisable to create a reliable system for storing private keys (seed), without relying on the fact that this information can be remembered.

Surely as many members already mentioned, memorizing the whole seed words is dumb as fuck, unless it is either done for temporary reasons and there is some kind of a physical back up somewhere.  

So for example if you were crossing a border and may be never coming back, you could potentially still hide the keys in a place that you ONLY know in the origination location and then carry them across the border ONLY in your head..... but then you would need to secure them on the other side of the border, and the back up would be in the origination location.. and if something really uneventful happened, then you would have to go back to the origination location to retrieve.

The point about people forgetting even very basic things is important too, so it may well be the case that  all you have to remember is the location of 1, 2 or 3 pieces of paper, then the rest would be self-explanatory, but you cannot remember the locations of those three pieces of paper...and of course, we have the problem of passing down to someone, but not wanting to pass it down before hand, and yeah, memorization is going to do diddly squat for passing down to anyone, and sure there may be some of us who don't have anyone who we would like to pass down our keys.. so we would die with whatever keys we have..and spend whatever we are able to spend prior to such death or passing into a state of mental incapacitation..

These are challenging questions for a lot of folks.....

Oh and by the way, the title of the thread is surely misleading and also seeming on the wee bit of retardedness, since anyone should already know it is not the right answer and hardly the best answer, even if we might concede advantages and disadvantages of certain circumstances, there might be short time periods in which memorization might be the best of remedies in some particular narrow set of cases, including short term cases.

I suppose memorization might be good if the amount is not very much and the person considers continued memorization over the long term as a kind of a game and/or a challenge, so it becomes a kind of preferred and fun thing for that person, including understanding the challenge and/or the risks of losing it might be part of the fun.. so then at that point, there might be a question of how much... so in 2015, a guy might have bought a whole bitcoin for $250, and so then he thought that it is not very much money, and he wants to play a game of remembering his seed words and perhaps repeating them once a week or once a month or whatever frequency is necessary to reinforce the memory... so then after 10 years, he might start to think that his one bitcoin is turning into more value than he had expected in 2015, so sure, he could change his method, in the event that he still remembers and he had not accidentally disclosed the words to someone else when he was in a state of delirium in the past 10 years.  Maybe his coin is still there?

This was the reason I lost my first wallet 2017, a very painful experience after I lost my phone and tried to recall my seed phrase on my new device and found out I had forgotten about 2 words,.

It shouldn't be a big problem to find two or three missing words from 12 to 24 mnemonic recovery words, especially when you know some public addresses of your wallet and even better when you know their exact full derivation path. I wouldn't consider such a wallet as lost, judging from very preliminary details here.

Why didn't you properly document your mnemonic recovery words on paper and/or metal in the first place? It makes no sense to try to memorize them for long term "storage". This will inevitably fail, almost guaranteed.

With one or two words forgotten a wallet is as good as lost especially for newbies who are not familiar with seed phrases nd tried to rely on their brain not documenting it anywhere maybe because they weren't thought or they felt they could rely on their ability to recall which was my experience then
 So when sensitive things like these are being talked about we must put everyone one into perspective and consideration since there are people of all categories here( experience and age wise)
However are both saying the same thing sir, your last paragraph is my whole point......

You are suggesting that you likely forgot more than two words, perhaps including the order of the words - because I think what Cricktor is suggesting is that if you knew everything about your seed words except for two words, and you also knew the location of the two words that you forgot (you knew the location of the remainder of the words), or some variables close like that, then you probably would be able to recover the wallet with either 12 or a 24 seed words.

[Findingnemo]

You are suggesting that you likely forgot more than two words, perhaps including the order of the words - because I think what Cricktor is suggesting is that if you knew everything about your seed words except for two words, and you also knew the location of the two words that you forgot (you knew the location of the remainder of the words), or some variables close like that, then you probably would be able to recover the wallet with either 12 or a 24 seed words.

If 3 words are missing in a 12 or 24 words seed still it's possible to recover but it may need few weeks of brute forcing with intense resources to crack the combination of the seed is BIP 39 but anything more than 3 words is impossible to brute force and at that point we can conclude the wallet is lost irrespective of the wallet balance cause with no amount of processing we can't break that combination.

I won't trust my memory at all, assuming saving seeds with us is the safest I dare people to try and prove me wrong in the next few years. It's better storing in USB stick cause atleast we can be sure there's a way of accessible to our wallet whenever we want.

[Hazink]

OP has to change the emphasis in his topic putting  MEMORIZATION  as the worst security for SEED phrase rather than ultimate one. Why is this - all said by others respondents in his topic.

If yuo wanna the ultimate security reap the fruit from this topic. The method described there allowed me to disseminate literally  all over the world   the stuff keeping  my SEED and not to be bothered about its security.

The Op will never do that as he or she have started on that his first comment being corrected by other members.

I don't know why someone will not think about the side effect of something before recommending it for others; that's the craziest way of storing your wallet phrase. In fact, the title should have been "The fastest way of losing access to your wallet is memorising your phrase." That should have served as a better warning rather than a misleading recommendation.

[JayJuanGee]

You are suggesting that you likely forgot more than two words, perhaps including the order of the words - because I think what Cricktor is suggesting is that if you knew everything about your seed words except for two words, and you also knew the location of the two words that you forgot (you knew the location of the remainder of the words), or some variables close like that, then you probably would be able to recover the wallet with either 12 or a 24 seed words.

If 3 words are missing in a 12 or 24 words seed still it's possible to recover but it may need few weeks of brute forcing with intense resources to crack the combination of the seed is BIP 39 but anything more than 3 words is impossible to brute force and at that point we can conclude the wallet is lost irrespective of the wallet balance cause with no amount of processing we can't break that combination.

I won't trust my memory at all, assuming saving seeds with us is the safest I dare people to try and prove me wrong in the next few years. It's better storing in USB stick cause atleast we can be sure there's a way of accessible to our wallet whenever we want.

Are you referring to storing your private keys (or perhaps your back up seed words) in a encrypted USB stick or something else? Of course if that is the ONLY location of your backup, you might have to have more than 1 USB stick perhaps with the same backup password in more than one location?.. but surely one back up is better than ONLY memory... but ONLY one back up has its vulnerabilities  too.. and surely some folks might not encrypt their USB stick, too...so that would be a potential vulnerability, too.

[Soft Crem]

It is a bad idea to use memorization as a way to memorize your seed phrase. Human memory is not strong - it can be wrong or you will forget important words from the seed phrase and you will ruin the whole thing. There is no better way to use other media that is stronger and more durable, such as stainless steel, you can carve your seed phrase there and keep it in a safe place. This method can be much better than just relying on memory alone.

I personally think it's better not to worry about memorizing seed phrases too much because it wastes people's memory power.  And makes people weak.  From here we have to use some media like stainless steel so that our memory power is not a problem.  And will help us to do things very fast.

[K_vin]

My point is with experience someone can memorize and maybe be able to recall since they have been long in the game, maybe they can just have fun but suggesting it to a total novice entering the space newly might be too detrimental no matter how much brain power he/she has, this is a wallet that contains assets that one wishes to hold for as long as possible, storing the phrases on USB, mail,paper etc any other means should be encouraged and maybe after that you can decide to memorize it just for fun knowing fully well that the phrases are saved, both words and sequence.. some of us were not taught when we started earlier, so we just memorized and most of us forgot both words n sequence and I cant encourage any newbie to go through that rout

[Z-tight]

My point is with experience someone can memorize and maybe be able to recall since they have been long in the game, maybe they can just have fun but suggesting it to a total novice entering the space newly might be too detrimental no matter how much brain power he/she has

This is not true, it does not matter how long one has been a bitcoiner, memorizing your seed phrase is never recommended for anyone, except you want to lock yourself out of your funds.

this is a wallet that contains assets that one wishes to hold for as long as possible, storing the phrases on USB, mail,paper etc any other means should be encouraged

Never store your seed phrase in your email or anywhere online. It is only recommended to store your seed phrase offline, i.e. engraving it on a stainless steel or writing it down on paper.