Your crypto wallet seed phrase determines the safety of your cryptocurrency. And it depends only on you where you will store your crypto wallet seed phrase and how safe this place is. Because if you lose the seed phrase, then you lose all your money in your wallet.
The issue of seed phrase safety is more important during the fall of the cryptocurrency market when the prices are low, and selling digital assets doesn't make economical sense.
And if you don't want to take losses and sell your cryptocurrencies for cheap, you have to attach great significance to where and how you will store your seed cryptocurrencies. Remember that security begins with a seed phrase, sometimes called a recovery phrase.
Crypto assets are in the grip of a bear market. Ever since Do Kwon's Terra project went up in smoke, the risks of storing cryptocurrencies on even the most reputable cryptocurrency exchanges have increased significantly, causing many decentralization advocates to cry, "Not your keys, not your coins."
There is constant news that the next "trusted" cryptocurrency lender is freezing customer withdrawals.
From Vault, a Singapore-based cryptocurrency lender, to Zipmax, a Thai cryptocurrency exchange with 200,000 customers, and Celsius, a world-famous exchange, many centralized lending platforms have suffered a similar fate, resulting in huge losses to customers of centralized financial institutions and funds.
The growing distrust to centralized institutions is leading users to think more and more about storing their assets on decentralized platforms under the protection of a seed phrase.
A seed phrase, sometimes called a private key, is a list of 12 or 24 words that form a mnemonic phrase. A hardware wallet, or cold wallet, contains these keys, providing a convenient way to send or "sign" funds.
If a cracker steals your hardware wallet or the device on which it is stored, but not the seed phrase, it is not a critical problem.
Seed phrase can be used with a new wallet. Your money in your decentralized wallet cannot be blocked and no matter where you go, no matter where you are in the world 12 or 24 words can be used to access bitcoin.
Where you should not store the seed phrase
- A cloud storage account
Cybercriminals Heather Morgan and her cybersecurity specialist husband, Ilya Lichtenstein, stored their seed phrase in a cloud storage account. The FBI cracked their iCloud passwords to gain access to more than $4 billion in BTC. Don't store your seed phrase online, including your notes in Evernote, in an email draft, or on social media and messengers.
- Phone
Never store the seed phrase on your phone. Predicting text on your smartphone can really guess the seed phrase. Now imagine what would happen if thieves stole your phone.
- Refrigerator
The refrigerator is also not an ideal place for "cold" storage of cryptocurrencies. There is a lot of humidity in the fridge, and the paper storage medium where your seed phrase is recorded can get damaged and the ink can get blurred. You should not keep a flash drive or other electronic media in the fridge either. Humidity and low temperatures have a negative effect on equipment.
- Your own memory
Your own memory is the worst place to store a seed phrase. You can perfectly remember all the dates of historical battles, bank card pincodes, or birthdates of everyone you know, but at a critical moment forget the seed phrase from your wallet.
- On paper in your wallet
On paper in your wallet. The wallet can be stolen. He looks too attractive for thieves.
Tips for storing the seed phrase
You can buy a $30 safe on Amazon or build a small wooden box or get a nice storage box to hold your important papers. Keep your seed phrases in it.
Put in this box something really important to you. That way, whenever "you do a general cleaning or when you move, you won't throw it away.
There are even more creative ideas for storing seed phrases.
Bitcoin lawyer Onthebrinkie 3D-printed an adult sex toy and hid the seed phrase in it. The idea is that if an intruder breaks into your house, he can steal a wooden box full of important documents, but no one in their right mind would steal a sex toy.
