What is BIP39 mnemonic phrase?

It protects your crypto wallet and allows easy recovery. Learn more about this feature.

The example of old type bitcoin private key would look like this:
8e4616c0b8d9e6d60d5ddc5e0be61ac492cb11e7737d73e0eec81da1c1fd2f14

With introduction of BIP39, the whole process of generating and accessing bitcoin and other cryptocurrency wallets was simplified. This was to simplify process of creating recovery seeds for your wallet and restoring it. BIP39 comes from Bitcoin Improvement Proposal no. 39.

Example of BIP39 mnemonic phrase with 12 words:
glory remain shrug expand feed they notice similar diagram acquire hour razor

With this example you can see that the BIP39 mnemonic phrase is indeed much easier to use than the previous private key recovery phrase. It is also much harder to make a mistake while writing it down.

The BIP39 protocol uses a list of 2048 carefully chosen english words. Although the lists in different languages exist, it is not recommended to use them because most wallets do not support other than English words.

a) smart selection of words:
the wordlist is created in such a way that it’s enough to type the first four letters to unambiguously identify the word

b) similar words avoided:
word pairs like “build” and “built”, “woman” and “women”, or “quick” and “quickly” not only make remembering the sentence difficult but are also more error prone and more difficult to guess

c) sorted wordlists:
the wordlist is sorted which allows for more efficient lookup of the code words (i.e. implementations can use binary search instead of linear search) — this also allows trie (a prefix tree) to be used, e.g. for better compression

In theory, longer recovery phrase = more secure wallet. But even the 12 words mnemonic phrase gives more than enough security for this moment (January 2022). For the foreseeable future the 24 word recovery phrase would be the gold standard. The 24 words recovery phrase has a number of combination bigger than than there are atoms i n the known universe. This is why full length (24 words) recovery seed phrase gives you full protection from hackers trying to randomly generate your mnemonic phrase and getting access to your fund.
This is just the basics and we will write about this topic more in the future.

Your mnemonic phrase written on piece of paper, even if stored in a locked safe or buried down in a pile of other documents is still a piece of paper. Different kind of situation can put your backup phrase in danger and make it unreadable in the future. Paper can be destroyed easily.

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