A recovery seed, backup seed, seed phrase, mnemonic seed, mnemonic phrase, pass phrase or backup phrase is a list of words which store all the information needed to recover hardware or software wallet funds. Wallets will typically generate a recovery seed and instruct the user to write it down on paper. If the user’s computer, hardware wallet or smartphone breaks, or their hard drive becomes corrupted, they can  use the paper backup to get their coins back. This is a very elegant solution!

Unfortunately paper is prone to fire and water (among many other things). That’s why Tinyseed enables you to back up the seed phrase of your wallet on solid titanium.

Tinyseed follows the open source industry standart for recovery seeds, called BIP39. Wallets generate a recovery seed consisting of 12 to 24 words. All compatible wallets use the same BIP39 word list to choose words from. This list contains 2048 alphabetically ordered and numbered words.  Instead of punching letters and words directly, it is the number representing their respective position in the word list, that is punched into Tinyseed.

 Punching numbers instead of words is key to Tinyseeds exclusive small size.

BIP39 (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 39) is an open industry standard that defines how a recovery seed is constructed. It contains a list of 2048 alphabetically ordered words. Recovery seeds consist of up to 24 uniquely ordered words from that list.

It’s just binary numbers, the standart every computer operates on. Numbers can be writen as binary, e.g. the binary of the number “1928” equals “011110001000”. Tinyseeds punching patterns are identical to binary numbers, “0” means “no punch” and “1” means “punch”. You could easily calculate the binary representation of a given number yourself, even without using a computer – but you don’t have to.

Get it here: Tinyseed BIP39 word list. But to read Tinyseed you’re not dependent on us, our website or a printed word list. You don’t need to know the word list with punch patterns to recover your seed phrase. Just add up the numbers that are punched and find your words in any available copy of the open source BIP39 word list.

No, not at all. If we close our business and leave this simulation for good, you can still access your funds. BIP39 is an industry standart and open source. You can download the word list any time from github and many other sources. You don’t need to know the word list with punch patterns to recover your seed phrase. Just add up the numbers that are punched and find your words in any available copy of the open source BIP39 word list.

Basically all of them. The only condition is that the software or hardware wallet you use to manage your assets complies with the BIP39 standard, which is the case with almost all wallets.

The 25th word allows you to label backups. You can assign a word from the word list to each of your backups to give it a name, any additional information that is not security critical can then be stored elsewhere and given the same label. This way up to 2048 backups can be labeled. Of course the backups can be numbered in the same way, then up to 4096 different values are possible.

While this is possible if you choose a word from the BIP39 word list as the password, it is not recommended. It would not be a secure password, and if the backup is compromised, the password would be compromised as well. In general, it makes little sense to back up the password to a wallet along with the seed phrase of that wallet.

Use the 25th instead to label or number your different backups.