Blog
-
It all starts with the SEED
+
It all starts with the seed
- Bitcoin After Life
+ Bitcoin After Life
8 min read
@@ -218,7 +218,7 @@ footer .built{font-size:13px;color:var(--muted);margin-top:8px}
None of this means hardware wallets are useless. Air-gapped signing genuinely protects against malware on your computer, and that threat is real. But the incident draws the boundary clearly: a hardware device can protect keys after they exist. It cannot make its own birth verifiable. And knowledge — understanding where your entropy comes from and how to check it — protects you in ways no purchased device can.
Why we did not reinvent the wallet
-
When we designed Bitcoin After Life, one decision came before all others: the protocol would live inside Electrum as a plug-in, not inside a new wallet of our own.
+
When we designed Bitcoin After Life, one decision came before all others: the protocol would live inside Electrum as a plug-in, not inside a new wallet of our own.
It would have been more glamorous to ship "the BAL wallet". It also would have been irresponsible. An inheritance protocol asks people to plan across decades. Whoever asks for that kind of time horizon has a duty to build on the most scrutinized foundations available — not on code that is six months old, however carefully written.
Electrum has existed since 2011. It is one of the most reviewed pieces of Bitcoin software in the world, it has survived fifteen years of adversarial attention, and its seed handling is publicly documented down to the mathematics. A standard Electrum seed phrase carries 132 bits of entropy, drawn from the operating system's cryptographically secure random number generator — a component that is not a niche codebase but one of the most heavily audited pieces of software on the planet, reviewed for decades by the entire security industry across every field that depends on it. On top of that, Electrum's documented seed-version design brings the effective cost of a brute-force attack to roughly 2135 operations. These are not marketing figures; they are published, and anyone can check the code that implements them.
This is the meaning of a choice we made early and have repeated often: remaining a plug-in of one of the most tested wallets in the world is a deliberate design decision, not a fallback. We add exactly one thing — time-locked inheritance through nLockTime and the Will-Executor network — and we inherit everything else, including seed generation, from a codebase that has earned trust the only way trust is earned in this industry: by surviving.
@@ -231,7 +231,7 @@ footer .built{font-size:13px;color:var(--muted);margin-top:8px}
What this means for inheritance
An inheritance plan compounds every assumption you make today across the decades it must survive. A weakness that is merely theoretical over one year becomes a real risk over thirty. The Coldcard sweep targeted dormant addresses — precisely the profile of long-term, set-aside funds. Precisely the profile of an inheritance.
-
This is why Bitcoin After Life's architecture keeps returning to the same principles: use Bitcoin's native, consensus-level features (nLockTime) rather than novel constructions; rely on incentives rather than promises; renew the inheritance transaction every two to three years, so the plan absorbs protocol improvements and lessons like this one; and build only on code that the world has been attacking, and failing to break, for many years.
+
This is why Bitcoin After Life's architecture keeps returning to the same principles: use Bitcoin's native, consensus-level features (nLockTime) rather than novel constructions; rely on incentives rather than promises; renew the inheritance transaction every two to three years, so the plan absorbs protocol improvements and lessons like this one; and build only on code that the world has been attacking, and failing to break, for many years.
And one practical note, because it matters more than any argument: if you generated a seed on an affected Coldcard device since March 2021, follow Coinkite's advisory — update the firmware, generate a new seed on corrected software, and move your funds. Whatever wallet you use, your inheritance plan is only as good as the seed underneath it.
Conclusion: the root comes first
@@ -252,7 +252,7 @@ footer .built{font-size:13px;color:var(--muted);margin-top:8px}
