Ever wondered if you should use a 12 or 24 word seed for your Bitcoin?š
Wonder no longer as our most recent blog post details why 12 words should be the standard across the space as they bring better UX and no loss in real-world security.
https://foundationdevices.com/2023/06/make-12-words-the-standard/
This article was a passion project of mine as it's something I've long wanted to answer, and surprisingly seems to have no one-stop resource out there.
Let's make 12 word seed phrases the standard across the Bitcoin ecosystem!
Would love to hear y'all's thoughts on this one as it's a pretty divisive topic sometimes, but hopefully this can put things to rest and help simplify people's Bitcoin journey a bit by reducing the size of the secret they have to store.
Steel stampers everywhere will be happy š
A huge shoutout to my friend Luke Parker, a brilliant developer and cryptographer, for providing amazing cryptography feedback for me throughout.
Couldn't have done it nearly as well without him, and he always keeps me humble and makes me want to keep learning!
Iām trying to zap you, but Iām getting an invalid lightning address error
Iām setting up my family with 12 words. With 24 words, the squeeze is not worth the juice
š
An interesting read. Personally I like 12 words for hot wallets and 24 for cold storage. Just my opinion.
Their comparison between guessing a seed phrase and guessing a private key is irrelevant because your seed phrase unlocks many private keys. Your extended private key is 512 bits long, so it would take 48 words to fully represent that. 24 words seems like a good compromise šš¼
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There's a small mistake in the article. The seed contains a checksum which makes it actually 128-bit - exactly the same as private key.
Updated, thank you!
12 words + passphrase š¤
