The power of adding a passphrase to your wallet increases your security by thousands of times.
Here’s a nice test story:
The experienced user @ColeTU
would use a Coldcard Mk3 wallet and, from that seed, create 4 more wallets, but with a passphrase.
Then he would send funds in equal parts to those 5 wallets to see what would happen to his funds.
For this, to his original seed he created 4 additional derivations using a passphrase and sent funds to each of them:
- Wallet 1: seed phrase only
- Wallet 2: seed phrase + 1-word passphrase
- Wallet 3: seed phrase + 2-word passphrase
- Wallet 4: seed phrase + 3-word passphrase
- Wallet 5: seed phrase + passphrase of random numbers
With this, he wanted to see whether the funds were safe and how long it would take for them to be compromised until they were stolen.
The responses didn’t take long to arrive.
In the first few minutes, the original wallet (the seed only) is instantly drained: all its funds are stolen in a snap.
Days passed, and almost a week later, the remaining 4 wallets with different levels of passphrase difficulty are still intact.
Even the one with the lowest security—the easiest one-word passphrase—remains intact, with the funds not stolen.
This shows the great protection that a passphrase gives our seed, even with a simple key of just one word.
A week passed, and one of the main features that this mechanism provides is TIME. Passphrases give you the world’s most valuable asset: TIME.
Time to take action and save your assets. Time to move your assets to another new wallet.
Time between losing or winning.
If this user had been attacked at the time the Coldcard was being drained, he would have lost the “lure” assets of the primary wallet (the one with the seed only), but he would have had enough time to save the rest of his assets.
Take care of your assets; take care of your security.
Here’s a nice test story:
The experienced user @ColeTU
would use a Coldcard Mk3 wallet and, from that seed, create 4 more wallets, but with a passphrase.
Then he would send funds in equal parts to those 5 wallets to see what would happen to his funds.
For this, to his original seed he created 4 additional derivations using a passphrase and sent funds to each of them:
- Wallet 1: seed phrase only
- Wallet 2: seed phrase + 1-word passphrase
- Wallet 3: seed phrase + 2-word passphrase
- Wallet 4: seed phrase + 3-word passphrase
- Wallet 5: seed phrase + passphrase of random numbers
With this, he wanted to see whether the funds were safe and how long it would take for them to be compromised until they were stolen.
The responses didn’t take long to arrive.
In the first few minutes, the original wallet (the seed only) is instantly drained: all its funds are stolen in a snap.
Days passed, and almost a week later, the remaining 4 wallets with different levels of passphrase difficulty are still intact.
Even the one with the lowest security—the easiest one-word passphrase—remains intact, with the funds not stolen.
This shows the great protection that a passphrase gives our seed, even with a simple key of just one word.
A week passed, and one of the main features that this mechanism provides is TIME. Passphrases give you the world’s most valuable asset: TIME.
Time to take action and save your assets. Time to move your assets to another new wallet.
Time between losing or winning.
If this user had been attacked at the time the Coldcard was being drained, he would have lost the “lure” assets of the primary wallet (the one with the seed only), but he would have had enough time to save the rest of his assets.
Take care of your assets; take care of your security.