Some wallets may allow you to access your seed phrase from inside the wallet, but this is risky if your phone is not secure.įor example, when generating your CoolWallet recovery seed (no parties can access the private key, which is securely locked for all eternity inside our secure element), we strongly recommend you use our offline hardware wallet’s screen to show the seeds and commit them to a paper wallet only. When creating a cryptocurrency wallet for the first time, you are required to backup your seed phrase. (New to Bitcoin? Check out our Big Bitcoin Beginner Guide for 2021 here)

To drive home this scary statistic and help you protect your future wealth against yourself, we’re going to go over the basics really quick and then revisit the biggest private key horror stories and tragedies in Bitcoin’s brief history. In fact, research shows that up to a staggering 20%, or 3.7 million, of all Bitcoins have been lost forever. The road to crypto riches is paved with Bitcoin gold but unfortunately also littered with the wreckages of poorly managed, lost or hacked wallets. (If not, then Houston, we may have a problem and we probably won’t be seeing you on the moon…) Therefore, chances are you’ll know what a private key or recovery seed is. If you believe in the concept of “Not Your Keys, Not Your Crypto” you probably take personal responsibility for your crypto portfolio by keeping it on a non-custodial solution (preferably a versatile hardware wallet like the CoolWallet) instead of centralized exchanges, which come with their own litany of horror stories of hacks and scams (the author may or may not have thousands of Dogecoins floating around the wreckage of the hacked and now-defunct Cryptopia exchange, forever lost). The information provided herewith is for educational purposes only and should not be construed as financial advice of any kind. The opinions contained within this article are solely that of the author and don’t reflect the views of CoolBitX or CoolWallet team.

Ironkey digital wallet