ENTROPÍA

What to write down besides your 12 words

The ceremony derived all four formats and none of them produced your address. That almost always means a piece is missing — and that piece is not a secret.

Your twelve words alone are not always enough. And what's missing is usually something nobody told you to write down, because it doesn't look important until the day it is.

What might be missing

A passphrase. The most common cause. A passphrase — sometimes called the "13th word" — produces a completely different wallet from the same twelve words. It has no checksum of any kind: every passphrase is valid, so a different capital letter or an extra space opens a real, empty wallet without telling you anything. Unlike the words, this mistake is never detected.

A non-standard derivation path. Some older wallets, and some exchange withdrawal wallets, use their own paths that don't correspond to any of the four common formats.

A seed that isn't BIP-39. Electrum had its own seed format for years. The two look identical — English words — but they are not compatible, and there is no way to tell by looking at them.

A multisig. If the wallet required several signatures, no single seed derives the address: you need the descriptor, which says how many keys there are and how they combine.

The important part: none of this is a secret

This is the part almost nobody acts on. That a passphrase exists is not the passphrase. Which wallet created the seed is not the seed. That it's a 2-of-3 is not any of the keys.

Whoever finds a note that says "hardware wallet brand X, 2021, with passphrase, stored separately" gains nothing from it. But whoever has to recover your wallet without that note can take weeks — or never manage it.

It's information that only has value for someone who already has the words — that is, for you, and for whoever you want to have them.

The five lines

  1. Which wallet created it, make and model
  2. What year
  3. Whether there is a passphrase, yes or no — and where the other half lives, not what it is
  4. If it's a multisig, how many keys and where each one lives
  5. The address format, if you know it: 1…, 3…, bc1q… or bc1p…

Five lines next to the words. None of them can spend a satoshi. Together they are the difference between "I restored the wallet" and "I have twelve words and no idea what they open".

And this never changes. Nobody offering to help needs your twelve words — not to identify the format, not to verify anything, not to check whether it can be fixed. Everything on this page happens on your own computer. Whoever asks for them is asking for the wallet.

The five lines are one dependency. There are more

Writing down which wallet, what year and whether there's a passphrase solves one of them: rebuilding. The others remain, and they're almost never where you look.

The email account that recovers the phone, the phone that holds the second factor, the one person who knows where the box is. Six questions draw that map and point at the piece that, if missing, locks you out of everything else.

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