Review your backup wallet. Woman throws husband's USB drive with millions in BTC

[Forsyth Jones]

I think I've come across something similar to what you just said but I still don't fully understand how the whole SLIP-39 seed works. Plus back in the day I still remember that ELECTRUM seeds  were considered better than the regular BIP- 39 seeds because of their word list and entropy too.

The electrum seed is considered more secure than BIP39 because it uses a version number that determines the type of wallet that will be generated, making it easier to restore and use. Whereas in bip39, the same seed can be used for all addres script type available, but as today practically all wallets follow the already established standards, it shouldn't be a problem to restore in the future and today there is a lot of docs on restoring bip39 wallets seeds.

I think the electrum seed system is interesting for beginners, as it involves less complexity in configuring the wallet.

I never knew BIP 39 seeds of electrum had better entropy. To my understanding
They are all 128 bits for a twelve word seedphrase and boast same entropy likewise SLIP 39(20 words here) .
The only difference is in application
SLIP strength is on distributed security making it harder to steal, electrum just boost flexibility and little less complex.

I'll add a few articles from Trezor explaining more about how the SLIP-39 shamir backup works, or rather, they don't call it by that name anymore, now it's multi-share backup or something like that.

Multi-share Backup on Trezor

What is Multi-share Backup and Why You Need to Know About It

I'm not a fan of slip-39 because it's not backward-compatible with BIP-39 (you can't turn a SLIP-39 seed into a BIP-39 seed or vice versa). Therefore, BIP-39 is better suited for my use case.
Although Ledger claims that it's possible to convert a SLIP-39 seed to BIP-39 using their app, I wasn't able to do it. If anyone has managed to, please let me know.

One key requirement was the ability to generate shares compatible with a BIP39 round trip. Another was using a standard solution instead of inventing my own.

An existing SLIP-39 solution used by another hardware wallet, unfortunately, cannot perform the required round trip.

Then I discovered the SSKR library, which was the perfect fit for several reasons. SSKR stands for Sharded Secret Key Reconstruction. It takes the SLIP-39 method and enhances it.

SSKR is an open-source, interoperable standard that builds upon SLIP-39 with various improvements, including BIP39 <-> SSKR round trip functionality. It perfectly meets all my requirements for the app.

Additionally, the creators of SSKR provide a security-audited, well-documented C library. One of its creators is a co-author of TLS, the bedrock of internet security, demonstrating SSKR’s impeccable security pedigree.

While SSKR forms the core of the app, its integration within a larger framework allows for potential future features like Envelope-SSKR. That can be added to the app.

The issue of multiple backups location is that it increases the likelihood of the seedphrase getting exposed.

One of the strategies to get around seed phrase exposure is to add passphrases to your wallet that will be used to store funds, you can add as many passphrases as you like, in which case, if someone finds your mnemonic backup, they won't be able to access the funds because the funds are protected by your passphrase in a hidden wallet accessible by it.

So it's extremely important to store both the seedphrase and the passphrase in different locations, you can store your seed phrase offline while backing up your passphrase in an encrypted keepass database, then you can duplicate the backups on pend drives, sd cards and so on.

Another strategy is to encrypt the seed phrase with pgp, but you must do this on an air-gapped offline computer. You need minimal knowledge of how to encrypt/decrypt files with gpg using symmetric or asymmetric encryption.

There are N ways to make your backup as protected as possible, but there are also N ways to lose if you mismanage your backups.

[Mia Chloe]

Whereas in bip39, the same seed can be used for all addres script type available, but as today practically all wallets follow the already established standards, it shouldn't be a problem to restore in the future and today there is a lot of docs on restoring bip39 wallets seeds.
I think the electrum seed system is interesting for beginners, as it involves less complexity in configuring the wallet.

Yeah it's actually makes sense though but from another end it seems BIP39 seed are kinda more compatible when it comes to hashing them on a couple of softwares. This is because the ELECTRUM seeds are actually custom seeds though they are more secure.

Basically what I'm trying to say is that BIP 39 seeds will load up on an ELECTRUM software however the reverse isn't the case because most wallets that allow the use of BIP 39 seeds won't be able to load up ELECTRUM seeds because of their nature.

[Lucius]

Who would have thought that the story of James Howell would be repeated after more than a decade?  His wife/girlfriend also threw the HDD with about 7000 BTC in the garbage and he is still trying to dig it out of the mountain of garbage for which the city council refuses to give him a permit to dig.

I don't understand at all why people don't learn anything from other people's mistakes, because keeping private keys on a USB stick in a junk drawer is so silly that I can't even imagine it. Besides, one backup is never enough, but some people obviously have to learn it the hard (and more expensive) way.

[Forsyth Jones]

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I follow the same line of reasoning as your thinking, I also thought the same when posting this topic. Years may pass, but people will always forget to do the basics, get robbed by cheap scammers, even those who are reasonably experienced get scammed, the human mind is quite a curious factor.  ;^P

People only realize their mistakes and regret not having done something so simple after the loss.

I know a friend who had almost the same thing happen to him. I helped him create the wallet and instructed him to write down the seed phrase on piece of paper, told him not to take photos or host a picture of the seed phrase on his phone or in the cloud. He did exactly what I told him not to do. 

He lost the written backup and it took him 4 years to find it. If he had diversified the backup, he would have had less headache.

Since he compromised the backup by taking a photo and storing it online, I urgently told him to create a new wallet, make a proper backup of the new one and transfer the funds once he confirmed everything was set up correctly. To this day, he's still using the wallet whose seed phrase he photographed...

How people take unnecessary risks...

[Lucius]

@Forsyth Jones, some people either simply don't understand, or are just careless with everything in life, including their crypto backup. I think most people think that nothing bad can happen to them, and then they are very vocal when it does happen to them and blame everyone else but themselves.

That's one of the reasons why I don't want to get involved in such things - my advice is very simple, first learn what you're investing in, then buy a reliable hardware wallet and learn how to safely store backups - if you don't want to/don't know that then you're not ready for such an investment.

[joniboini]

It's really annoying dealing with someone who always blames everyone but themselves. I remember a friend of mine losing an important document for his thesis because he didn't save it that often, knowing that the electricity in our dorm can be unreliable at times. People remind him that he should at least make a separate backup on another device, and he agrees but never actually does that. Then his laptop suddenly turned off because our electricity died while he forgot to save. He got really pissed and blames the government etc after that. Luckily, recovery helped him. Can't imagine what he'll do if he lost his money instead of a pdf file.