Another way of writing down your seed phrases

When you create a new wallet, you are always asked to write down your seed phrase. With that experience, when you see somewhere a list of 12 or 24 words, you automatically think this is a seed phrase someone lost or shared by mistake.

Using basic encryption, you can protect your seed phrase from **some** bad actors. Keep in mind that basic encryption doesn't guarantee your seed phrase is safe. However, it may help filter out those who are inexperienced.

The seed phrase is a set of 12 or 24 words from the BIP39 word list. The list is standardized and consists of 2048 unique words, meaning each word has its own index in the list, e.g. abandon = 1, choice = 322, etc. The full word list can be found here: https://privacypros.io/bip39-word-list/

If you replace your seed phrases with those numbers, you can introduce a layer of security.

Example seed phrase:

timber sword where noodle joy eagle admit tuna vibrant museum gossip river 

Result:

1810 1763 2003 1201 965 553 30 1876 1948 1166 808 1495 

For the person without experience, it will be quite hard to grasp what that list is and how to use it. This could be improved even further e.g. by merging the list into a huge single number that would make no sense to even more bad actors. However, it would also mean that we would have problems decrypting it because we wouldn't know where the current index ends and the new one starts. As I mentioned above, the list of words is standardized (it won't change), so it is safe to assume that each word from the list is identified by a maximum of 4 digits, and indexes with less digits could be converted to 4 by simply prepending 0 to them. So index 1 becomes 0001, index 64 becomes 0064, and index 986 becomes 0986. Given the same seed phrase, the result would look like this:

1810 1763 2003 1201 0965 0553 0030 1876 1948 1166 0808 1495 

And then you can write down the encrypted phrase as:

181017632003120109650553003018761948116608081495 

If you would like to give it a try, please make sure you can decrypt the phrase before ditching the list of the words you have. Just repeat the instructions in reverse order.

Stay safe!