A decoy wallet... for when someone gets your seed phrase? It's unlikely that someone will make their paraphrase long enough to prevent someone from brute forcing it. If you want a decoy seed phrase, why not change a few words and fix the checksum? At least then it's less obviously a decoy... "25 words" + low balance = decoy that you should run a dictionary attack on. 24 words with low balance is a wallet
Discussion
Obviously you have make it long enough! 😅
So someone should be not enough educated to use a weak passphrase, but has the competency to recalculate a checksum?
I repeat: it's an advanced feature, and like all advanced features it requires a precise application in relation to goals and circumstances.
For sure, every UI that exposes the passphrase possibility must do it carefully, use the correct terns ("25th word" is just wrong) and point the user to a good informative resource.
If a tool wants to support decoy seed phrases, it can recalculate the checksum for you. Breaking the philosophy that a seed phrase is all you need is dangerous, and will be more dangerous as Bitcoin becomes more popular
Even with the best UI, storing many seeds (an well know format, easy to spot) is more complex than having one seed with a customizable additional layer of security. I repeat, for advanced setups, not the casual user.
> It's unlikely that someone will make their paraphrase long enough to prevent someone from brute forcing it
Reality check: for the casual user that doesn't have a life changing amount in Bitcoin, it is more likely that the seed is found by a roommate or some random guy that works in their property, instead of being the target of a determined, informed and well-equipped attacker.
So even a medium simple and high memorable passphrase can be effective in many situations as additional security layer.
You can even store it in a password manager or your computer.
Sure. But casual users don't use password managers, and if they do probably they don't have sufficient opsec and backup procedures in place.
A memorable (easy to transcribe and store as well) passphrase seems a good starting point.
Make a 24 word seed
Use the first 12 words as a decoy
Use the second 12 words as a decoy
Use the second 12 plus the first 12 as a 24 word decoy
Now you have three decoys using the vast ecosystem of 12/24 phrase storage tools and no one ever has to lose funds because wtf is a 25 word seed
Splitting a 24-word seed does not create two valid 12-word seeds, the checksum fails.
And even if it were the case:
You're more likely to lose your phrase than to have it stolen
I talked about stolen *seeds*.
A passphrase can be memorizable, you can always store it securely in a password manager, and offline backup are safer since the format is not easily identifiable as is the case with seeds.
That's the problem: if you can memorize the passphrase, it's generally easy to brute force. If you can memorize 12 words, just do that. If you want a 24 word seed, store the first twelve, then memorize the second.
So far the argument has been that paraphrases are great for og Bitcoiners. That's fine, but they can figure out a way to work inside a system that doesn't burn the next billion Bitcoiners
its not hard to memorize 24 words + seed phrase,people have no idea how good memory is
although funny enough I can't mention this without a swarm of bitcoiners who say iTs NoT a GoOd iDeA tO mEmOriZE tHiNgs.
like bruh you do you if you don't want extra backups that can't be confuscated, but I lived through an era where police in Canada confuscated multisig wallets and they lost access to it.
Cmon, it's very hard to memorize 30+ random words. There are better ways to accomplish your goal
I thought the same until I tried it. its incredibly easy. you just do a memory palace / story technique.
this is a very misunderstood thing about humans
Thats fine, but you can just store a 24 word phrase as two 12 word phrase decoys and the rest of humanity will thank you