What is a mnemonic phrase? BIP39 Dictionary

What is a mnemonic phrase? Let's figure it out.

A mnemonic phrase is a group of words that provides access to your assets and serves as a backup for your crypto wallet (often also called a Seed Phrase or BIP39). A phrase can contain 12, 18, 24 words. The most common phrases are 12 and 24 words.

List of BIP39 words

The BIP39 word list is all the words that can and will be present in your mnemonic phrase. Their number is 2048 words. You can view the list of words at https://bip39-phrase.com/.

How important is a mnemonic phrase?

Let's imagine that you didn't back up your crypto wallet that you were using on your smartphone and you lost your smartphone. How to access funds? The answer, unfortunately, is no. In the world of cryptocurrency, there is no centralized authority that can help restore access to assets, as there is with a bank account. Losing access and backup in the world of crypto is the end for your assets, they will forever remain in the wallet you lost. All you can do is look at them in Blockchain Explorer.

At the moment, 4.8 million BTC are no longer in circulation, which is about 25.5% of all bitcoins. Unfortunately, there are no exact statistics on the number of people who have lost assets, but very often on news sites you can see loud headlines about someone losing a large sum due to carelessness.

A securely stored mnemonic phrase is the #1 action you need to take after creating your crypto wallet. It will allow you to restore access to funds on another smartphone or hardware wallet, if necessary.

Unfortunately, there are also disadvantages to this technology. Anyone who gets hold of your phrase will be able to access your funds. That is why it is very important to keep your phrase secret and not share it with third parties.

How to reliably store a mnemonic phrase?

There are several storage options:

• Paper record.
• Mnemonic tablets

The most reliable method is storage using a mnemonic tablet. The mnemonic tablet is most often made of resistant metal plates that are not afraid of corrosion and high temperatures.

Is it possible to choose a mnemonic phrase?
To begin, imagine a 4-digit PIN code. In place of each digit we can indicate a value from 0–9.
Let's try to calculate the number of attempts we will need to find the code.

10^4 =10,000 combinations.
(This search is possible even in manual mode. If we talk about a PC, this operation will take no more than 1 second)

Now let's do the same trick, only now we won't have 4 numbers, but 12 mnemonic words.
And instead of the value from 0-9, we will have a BIP39 dictionary, which consists of 2048 words.

2048^12=5 444 517 870 735 015 415 413 993 718 908 291 383 296 combinations (In theory, selection is possible, but for this you will need to rent a supercomputer for several hundred thousand years).

What if you have a 24-word mnemonic phrase?
2048^24=29 642 774 844 752 946 028 434 172 162 224 104 410 437 116 074 403 984 394 101 141 506 025 761 187 823 616 combinations (In this case, even super the computer is powerless).

In addition to these calculations, the attacker will also have to make an additional request to obtain the wallet balance, which is assigned to your mnemonic phrase. And this is the same number of operations. We recommend that you do not worry about this.

Results

A mnemonic phrase is extremely important data that requires special care. A timely backup will protect you from loss of assets, save time and nerves. We hope you have already made a backup and it is in a safe place.