What Is Bitcoin Brain Wallet?

By Kapil Gauhar

If the safety of your bitcoins doesn’t let you sleep, it’s probably the time for you to consider a more secure solution. It’s quite a fact that exchanges can be hacked, hardware wallets can be lost, and smartphones can die. For the ultra-paranoid, there’s just one storage option that’s immovable to all known attack vectors. Want to know what that is? The Brainwallet!

Brainwallet – Bitcoin On The Brain

Sounds interesting but confusing, right? Well, Bitcoin is considered as a virtual currency. Unlike credit card or PayPal, it’s equally suited to the parallel world. You can’t spend this currency offline, but yes you can store it in the form of a paper wallet by saving the passkey on a piece of paper. Take that approach a step ahead by removing the paper. You will get yourself a brainwallet. And you know what? It’s the only bitcoin wallet that is 100% watertight to phishing or hardware failure. In case you die, your wallet dies with you.

How Can You Create Your Own Brain Wallet?

The basic concept of a brain wallet is that your private key is not written down anywhere, it’s memorized by the heart instead. The only way someone can get access to your Bitcoins by using this method is by forcing you personally to tell them your private key. Of course, this is the best way to secure crypto wallets.

Private keys are usually very long strings of numbers without any meaning. So, how can someone with absent-mind remember such a long mashup of letters?

Luckily, you don’t have to remember the random letters. You can simply use what is known as a passphrase.

Don’t know what passphrase is? A passphrase is a sentence that can mathematically be altered into a private key.

The passphrase has to be an entirely genuine sentence which doesn’t seem in any song or literature. The security is enhanced simply by including some kind of memorable personal information, which doesn’t actually have to be secret. A good brain passphrase will have dozens of characters.

Understanding of Passphrase Formula

To make your brain wallet, what all you have is a brain and a mnemonic seed generator. Armory, Electrum and Mycelium will all do the trick. Also, there’s brainwallet.io, which is a deterministic bitcoin address generator. This explains that you need to store bitcoin in your brain by memorizing your passphrase as well as salts. The address generation happens to be in your browser, and no data is ever sent to the server. The site’s Github repository can be examined for those of a wary disposition, and if you are thinking about a brainwallet, that’s you.

Well, there are not many dos and don’ts, when it comes to generating a brainwallet, but the following is an imperative don’t –

Don’t use any existing phrase as your passphrase as people have already created scripts which can search through millions of wallet addresses and try recognized phrases against them. In this way, your favourite biblical scripture is out of the question. Use an original random sequence of words. To make sure the true randomicity, Brainwallet.io allows you to drop any file into the text box. Then, your browser will perform a SHA256 hash and use the checksum as your passphrase.