electrum wallet: is recognizing the seed a problem?

I understand if you find someones seed, you get hold of the contents of the wallet correct?

If so, the fact that the seed is a list of 13 words, is not a risk regarding being recognized by anyone that get holds of that list?

I mean, if you keep some text file with a bunch of passwords, but without too much info on what places the passwords are for, the passwords might not be too useful to the person getting them. But if there is a list of 13 words, a list that can be see it matches a subset of the electrum seed list, is that not a risk? someone could realize quickly that is a electrum wallet seed...

I guess there are ways to improve this, like storing just the position of the words etc, but still.

electrum

tocolom

Posted 2017-10-24T22:15:41.803

Reputation:

Answers

I guess there are ways to improve this, like storing just the position of the words etc, but still

Well, don't store it in a place where someone else can find it. No matter what. Not even inside a bigger list of text to obfuscate it. It is trivial to verify which combinations of words might be a valid seed.

Pieter Wuille

Posted 2017-10-24T22:15:41.803

Reputation: 54 032

I'm not sure I understand your last sentence. I'm not at expert at all in this but I guess that since the words used in the seeds is a very specific list it wouldn't be hard to imagine some program parsing your text file looking for a subset of these set of words in the list and guessing that this is a seed for your wallet :/. Remember that there is potential malware, hackers or even some "friend" threating to steal your bitcoins.

Definitely it would be much safer if you just write your seed in a piece of paper and store it very safely.

salvarico

Posted 2017-10-24T22:15:41.803

Reputation: 63