Oddbean new post about login | logout Yo Marty, what are your thoughts about passphrase vs no passphrase? Some argue passphrase is the way to go, others argue that passphrase is just a 2 of 2 with a single point of failure. I’m trying to figure out what setup to incorporate. Any help is greatly appreciated
When in doubt, K.I.S.S. There will be very few situations in your life where having a pass phrase might matter, and you can use other methods to obtain the same effective result. With that said, I’ve used one before, and there are circumstances where it might make sense. Security must be managed at an individual level.
Can you share some examples of methods to obtain the same effective result?
Use a very simple pass phrase that you memorize and store in a password manager. You can call it a single point of failure, but that's hardly an issue if the chance of failure is close to zero for the wallet owner. On the other hand no pass phrase leads to a very significant single point of failure in your seed phrase.
Yes I agree. Plus, something happening to all 3 is very unlikely. So if something happens to the HW, there’s the seed + pass backup, and if something happens to the seed, there’s the HW to help you recover the seed.
Yeah I forgot about the hardware itself. For some HW devices it's possible to extract the seed from it, so without a pass phrase you have multiple ways of being owned (HW compromised, or paper / metal backup stolen).