Summary
TLDR: The bedrock of Bitcoin self-sovereignty is having control over your private keys. Private keys are just very large numbers that secure your Bitcoin. Mnemonic seeds, or seed phrases, were created to make handling private keys easier. Mnemonic seeds are encoded in a specific way to map binary numbers to words, reducing the risk of errors when backing up keys. This process ensures the security of your Bitcoin and allows for easy management of private keys using math.
Key Points
1. The bedrock of Bitcoin self-sovereignty is having control over your private keys. Without this, in one way or another, you are relinquishing control of your money to someone else. “Not your keys, not your coins” as the saying goes. A counter-intuitive aspect of Bitcoin for people who aren’t familiar with the technical underpinnings of it is “where” your Bitcoin actually is. When people think of a wallet, they think “the place where I keep my money.”
2. So what are your private keys? Just very large numbers. Extremely large. This is a private key in binary: 256 random 1s and 0s. This random number is what ultimately secures your Bitcoin. It might not look like much, but its randomness is what ensures your wallet’s security. There are almost as many possible Bitcoin private keys as there are atoms in the visible universe. That is how many numbers a computer would have to count through to generate and catalog all the private keys potentially possible. As long as the process used to generate the keys is truly random, your keys are safe.
3. BIP 39 Mnemonic Seeds: Mnemonic seeds, or seed phrases, were created to address the problem of the experience of interacting with your private keys. Each of those 12 words in a mnemonic seed is a binary number in an encoding scheme mapping specific strings of 1s and 0s to words. This drastically reduces the odds of you writing down something wrong and losing your Bitcoin in the process. The selection of the specific words on the list even went so far as to guarantee that none of the 2048 words have the same first four letters.