What was life like before seed phrase?

[Furball808]

The ease of which we create new wallets and use them to store, send, and receive bitcoin in has not always been the case. Back then every transaction generated a batch of new private key for privacy. This is to ensure that you are the only person with access to that wallet. Secured, yes. So, what’s wrong with that?

Private key is a very large, random number that may look like this in binary:

Code:

1110001011011001011110111100000101000100000010001001111010111011
0101011101110011111111111010101110100101110100111010
0111001010011011110100011000011111010111100110100101111001101110100000
1101101101110001101000110001111010001001001111011010101011001101101010

**Disclaimer: example is only for illustrative purposes only. REAL PRIVATE KEYS are 256 bits.

There are almost as many possible Bitcoin private keys as there are atoms in the visible universe. Is that not insane? As cool as it may all seem, it’s not the most human-friendly. Imagine having to back up your private key. It’s prone to errors. You write down just one wrong number in the wrong order and this private key will be useless. But now, it’s a lot more convenient and easier.

Comes in the BIP32 (bitcoin improvement proposal) that introduces a new type of wallet. Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallet allows us to have access to multiple private keys with only one master key. Instead of having to back up multiple private keys, you only need now one master key to have access to them all. This solved the issue of Just A Bunch of Keys system which what wallets used to have.

To make things even more convenient, BIP39 was introduced the next year which turned the master key into readable words. How did those confusing numbers turned into words? Well BIP39 introduced a standard encoding scheme which each word in a carefully crafted dictionary represented a binary number from 00000000001 to 11111111111.

An example would be this. A seed phrase now would be 12 or 24 words and each of them corresponds to a specific binary number.

truck: 11101001001
renew: 10110110001
fury: 01011110011
donkey: 01000001001
remind: 10110101110
laptop: 01111101000
reform: 10110100010
detail: 00111100010
split: 11010010001
grief: 01100110100
because: 00010011110
fat: 01010011011

In binary form it would look like this

Code:

 11101001001 10110110001 01011110011 01000001001 
10110101110 01111101000 10110100010 00111100010 
11010010001 01100110100 00010011110 01010011011 

You can now appreciate how easy it is now to store and save our seed phrase compared to back then. Why is our seed phrase or private key important anyway? NOT YOUR KEYS, NOT YOUR COINS. Store them safely because your private key is quite literally your only way to unlock your coins. If someone gets access to your seed phrase or private key, it’s game over. They own your bitcoin.

** Disclaimer: the example used is a seed phrase internal binary. From the seed phrase, a master key is derived from which your private key will be derived from. Example is not an ACTUAL representation. The numbers are supposed to be random.


Sources:
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/sponsored/understanding-your-bitcoin-keys-bip39-seed-words
https://cryptosteel.com/the-key-improvements-that-made-bitcoin-wallets-easy/

[noorman0]

While BIP39 makes things more practical, security still depends on the user. Whether they store the mnemonic in GDrive or write it on a sticky note stuck to the fridge. The reality is that even with all the convenience, it hasn't reduced the risk of seedphrase leaks and losses some parts. The problem isn't the increased usability, but the user's lack of basic understanding of self-security.

[Furball808]

While BIP39 makes things more practical, security still depends on the user. Whether they store the mnemonic in GDrive or write it on a sticky note stuck to the fridge. The reality is that even with all the convenience, it hasn't reduced the risk of seedphrase leaks and losses some parts. The problem isn't the increased usability, but the user's lack of basic understanding of self-security.

I believe the increased convenience may actually have caused complacency to some. Those with coins have grown too confident that they don’t maintain strong security measures anymore. Some might even say that they can just easily remember their seed phrase. Hopefully my post can allow others to appreciate seed phrase and not take advantage of it.

[joniboini]

I believe the increased convenience may actually have caused complacency to some. Those with coins have grown too confident that they don’t maintain strong security measures anymore.

That's just people in general. Regardless of how secure it is, people can be complacent for various reasons. I remember reading a thread on how someone lost their coins even if they used a hardware wallet; turns out there is malware on their computer. As mentioned above, you can't solve this by making an evolved version of the seed phrase or something else.

[Merit.s]

I believe the increased convenience may actually have caused complacency to some. Those with coins have grown too confident that they don’t maintain strong security measures anymore. Some might even say that they can just easily remember their seed phrase. Hopefully my post can allow others to appreciate seed phrase and not take advantage of it.

I wouldn't say that it's due to increase in confidence, it's because they don't understand the responsibility attached to you being your own bank. They feel you only write down your seed phrase and that's all. Unknown to them that it's not only when someone sees your seed phrase where you kept it but can compromise your wallet through your device. This why hardware wallet plays a major role in security than software wallet.

Adding passphrase to your seedphrase or use a multisig wallet is good for wallet security. The duplicates of your seed phrase and passphrase is very important.

[pawanjain]

Introduction of seed phrase has surely made life more easier but at the same time, convenience comes at a price.
Earlier, if one of the private keys were compromised then the hackers would get only funds present in that particular public key but seed phrase leaks these days gives away all of our funds to the hackers.
It's obvious that we have to become more responsible now that things have not only become easier for us but also for the hackers.
Only if we take the responsibility to secure our seed phrase then we can truly enjoy the convenience provided to us.

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

While BIP39 makes things more practical, security still depends on the user. Whether they store the mnemonic in GDrive or write it on a sticky note stuck to the fridge. The reality is that even with all the convenience, it hasn't reduced the risk of seedphrase leaks and losses some parts. The problem isn't the increased usability, but the user's lack of basic understanding of self-security.

The practice starts from a first step, like what did you do for creating their wallet and seed phrase, before later things like back up wallet, and wallet recovery test.

BIP39 is just a tool but Bitcoin users need to have Bitcoin wallet softwares to use, and if they use a bad one, they won't have a good wallet after creation. If they chose and used a bad wallet software, perhaps there are backdoors to steal bitcoins from wallets.

Open source.
Non custodial.
They are two most basic and most important things when choosing a Bitcoin wallet.
https://bitcoin.org/en/choose-your-wallet
https://walletscrutiny.com/

[Porfirii]

It is named mnemonic for some reason!

I don't know many people who store their seed phrases only in their heads, but converting numbers into words makes it feasible, at least. And what is undeniable is that chances to make a mistake when noting your seed on a paper (for example) are infinitely higher if you only copy 0s and 1s than if you write down just a few words. Even if you copied them wrong, you'd still have the ability to imagine where the problem may be, and with trial and error access your coins, like "did I write -wide- or -wild-?", but in binary the possible combinations would be too many, at least for those with no knowledge about how to brute force (if that's even possible).

[Ambatman]

Despite the complexity and length one advantage of private keys over seedphrase is that
With private key, once lost you loss access to the single address
While in seedphrase all address generated from it would be lost.
But I won't deny the fact that I prefer BIP 39 cause I don't think I would have been enthusiastic in owning different wallet.

[nc50lc]

Back then every transaction generated a batch of new private key for privacy. This is to ensure that you are the only person with access to that wallet.

Privacy aside (they can generate keys on the fly without a pre-generated keypool if it's for privacy),
That "batch of private keys" a.k.a "keypool" is mainly implemented to make sure that wallet backups contain enough pre-generated private keys that the online counterpart might use within a reasonable usage time.
Because since it's not HD, the backup will not be able to regenerate the new randomly generated keys in any of its copy.

Back then (to answer the title), users have to replace their backups from time to time to catch-up to their actual wallet's latest keypool.
That's so inconvenient that BIP32 is implemented.

E.g.: If it's an older non-HD wallet version, they have to replace their backup when they almost used 100 addresses.
Otherwise, if there's something happened to the wallet, restoring the backup will result with missing bitcoins since it can't recover the newly generated private keys.
Newer non-HD wallets increased the keypool to 1000.

[NotATether]

Nobody would write private keys in binary. They would use hexadecimal numbers (0-9, a-f), which is still not very legible but it is considerably shorter.

Granted, nobody can actually memorize this key format, which is how the infamous "brainwallet" technique came about, before BIP32 key derivation paths were invented.

[ABCbits]

Nobody would write private keys in binary. They would use hexadecimal numbers (0-9, a-f), which is still not very legible but it is considerably shorter.

I agree. Aside from backup wallet file, i recall some people used bitaddress to enter their private key and then print it on paper that shows both WIF format and QR code.

[Inior]

Nobody would write private keys in binary. They would use hexadecimal numbers (0-9, a-f), which is still not very legible but it is considerably shorter.

I agree. Aside from backup wallet file, i recall some people used bitaddress to enter their private key and then print it on paper that shows both WIF format and QR code.

Wow this is amazing, I'm just getting to learn this, and it feels really good knowing  the evolution of bitcoin private key. It's a gift to enjoy the new BIP39 after which BIP32 was invented. It might seem really easy but I know a lot of work was put in to ensure this transformation, I wish I could find a guide that would help advance in technical knowledge so I can also make some contribution to this network technically. There is always this inferior feeling of not contributing to bitcoin and I somehow feel guilty.

[nakamura12]

I believe the increased convenience may actually have caused complacency to some. Those with coins have grown too confident that they don’t maintain strong security measures anymore. Some might even say that they can just easily remember their seed phrase. Hopefully my post can allow others to appreciate seed phrase and not take advantage of it.

If I am not wrong is that they didn't experienced where they have to use the wallet backup file or even the private key that's why they didn't even appreciate or even take advantage of wallets this time where it's easier to create and easier to access the wallet just by providing the seed phrase. Well, it shows that people do indeed find a way to make it easier for Bitcoin enthusiast to do what they want to do like wanting to access wallet much easier and other advantages that it has compared to before.

[Sticky Bomb]

While BIP39 makes things more practical, security still depends on the user. Whether they store the mnemonic in GDrive or write it on a sticky note stuck to the fridge. The reality is that even with all the convenience, it hasn't reduced the risk of seedphrase leaks and losses some parts. The problem isn't the increased usability, but the user's lack of basic understanding of self-security.

I agree with you, Ignorance still deals a whole lot with many people, seed phrase as words have mage generating private keys easier from the seed phrases but we keep hearing news of successful wallet compromises every now and then. People have grown careless and social engineering very smart. Although they target ignorant ones and those who don't use separate devices for their wallets. No matter the pattern of safe keeping of coins you practice, whether hardware wallet or cold storage, and day your seeds finds it's way into the hands of a third party, your wallet is gone. You should protect your seeds as your life.

[pooya87]

To make things even more convenient, BIP39 was introduced the next year which turned the master key into readable words.

Technically BIP39 is turning a master entropy into human readable words which are then used to derive your BIP32 master key.

each word in a carefully crafted dictionary represented a binary number from 00000000001 to 11111111111.

The words in the word list are in a zero indexed array so the first one is representing zero. Your max number in binary (2047) is correct though.