Brainwallet
4 stars based on
51 reviews
A brainwallet refers to the concept of storing Bitcoins in one's own mind by memorizing a mnemonic recovery phrase. If the mnemonic is not recorded anywhere, the Bitcoins can be thought of as being held only in the mind of the owner. If a brainwallet is forgotten or the person dies or is permanently incapacitated, brainwallet bitcoin mineral Bitcoins are lost forever. Brainwallet bitcoin mineral memory techniques allow them to be memorized and recalled easily. To create a brainwallet, use Bitcoin wallet software to generate a mnemonic seed and then memorize it.
Such seeds are generated by wallets like ElectrumArmory and Mycelium. Brainwallets are not recommended to be used in brainwallet bitcoin mineral because of fallible human memory. But in special situations they could be very useful, for example when fleeing a country with only the clothes on your back.
To memorize a mnemonic seed with this method you must invent a story which hits the words as "keynotes". Try to make it like a fairy tale story, use imagery. Make it somehow striking and emotionally resonant.
When remembering you just remember the key words, not all the other words - the other can be remembered more as images and thoughts which are hard to write down. You'd imagine brainwallet bitcoin mineral through a building familiar to you, maybe your own home or workplace or school. Repeat this story in your head several times over a short period - the first few days. It will sink in, deep, after that. You'll only have to revisit it very occasionally. After a while you can ignore it for months and it'll still come back, not that I'd recommend relying on that.
Brainwallet bitcoin mineral 31 minutes in. Memorizing a list of 30 random words. Despite the memory aids, human memory can be very fallible. So if your only storage is memory brainwallet bitcoin mineral may find that it just vanished one day. An early old-style brainwallet was created by by memorization of a passphrase and converting it a private key with a hashing or key derivation algorithm example: That private brainwallet bitcoin mineral is then used to compute a Bitcoin address.
This method was found to be very insecure and should not be used. Humans are not a good source of entropy. Using a single address also has problems associated with address reuse. We've seen pretty concrete evidence that users are resistant to good advice in this space, and they are shocked when their favorite quotation is cracked and they lose their coins But it was 60 characters long!
I even added a special character! Although brainwallet passphrases were being exploited for years by this point, the talk helped bring the issues to more popular consciousness. If you have coins in an old-style brainwallet, the website http: It's highly recommended you move the out as soon as you can. Retrieved from " https: Navigation menu Personal tools Brainwallet bitcoin mineral account Log in.
Views Read View source View history. Sister projects Essays Source. This page was last edited on 24 Juneat Content is available under Creative Commons Attribution 3. Privacy policy About Bitcoin Wiki Disclaimers.