How to Memorize a Seed Phrase: Building Narratives from Nonsense

by Anthony Allen

It is not safe to rely on your memory as your only backup of a seed phrase. If you want to improve the security of your coins beyond just using a traditional seed phrase, you can make use of Shamir backup, which subdivides your seed in a way that prevents it from being damaged or stolen.

Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 39 (BIP39) was created in 2013 to make it easier to safely backup and restore cryptocurrency wallets. Derived from a very large random number, they represent a calculation based on 12 or 24 words and their sequential order. If you use the right words in the right order, you can restore your wallet anywhere. This is a pretty revolutionary idea, which allows you to take your money anywhere as long as you have the seed phrase with you.

While the random number would be practically impossible to memorize, the series of random words which make up a seed phrase can be memorized with practice. Be warned though, you should never rely on your memory as your only backup of your seed. Always keep a copy in a safe place, and know that your memory can fail, so it is preferable to use a Trezor to manage the seed more securely and reliably than the methods set out here.

Approaching a Memory Problem

Seed phrases were designed to be more human-readable than gigantic random numbers but they can still be a challenge to remember. A twelve-word seed, as used by the Trezor Model One, can probably be remembered just through repeated practice (i.e. brute-forcing your brain until it sticks), but to remember twenty-four we need to be a bit more systematic.

Before we start, let’s cover some fundamental principles that should be followed:

• A combination of common memorization techniques will be most effective. Use ones which you are comfortable with, such as flashcards or linking words sequentially.
• Once you have your seed memorized, you will need to regularly return to practice it.
• Do not use a computer to practice, only practice writing out your seed on paper, in private, and destroy any copies once you are done.
• You can not rely on your memory alone; we have hardware wallets for that.

Breaking Down Your Phrase

Your seed phrase is just a list of words, something we as humans have worked to memorize over millennia. No special techniques are needed for wallet mnemonics in particular, but some are more suited to each individual than others, and almost all approaches will be easier if you break it into chunks.

We’ll work with twenty-four words for this demonstration, but the same techniques can be used to speed up the process for learning twelve. Let’s roll the dice and see what we get:

caution today eager gadget artist differ salmon whisper ski lunch witness ability vanish umbrella river turn cost decide fossil engage replace kidney lift ensure

Creating Narratives

The first step is just to read through the whole phrase and get a sense of the words which comprise it. What do they evoke in you? Pick at pairs, triplets and quadruplets — do they relate to each other? Start joining them together mentally, and then split them into fragments which do feel like a relation can be made. The idea is to create independent mini-narratives which can later be threaded together once each has been memorized independently:

1. Caution today!: a strong declarative statement, think of news headlines or a weather warning. Use punctuation if it helps.
2. Eager gadget artist differ: the adjective-noun-verb pattern here depends on making features specific and self-evident. Think of Steve Jobs’ esotericism; an eager gadget artist who differed from the norm.
3. Salmon whisper: fighting the current of the river, salmon whisper to each other as they proceed upstream.
4. Ski lunch: what else is there to do on the slopes but ski all morning before a hearty lunch?
5. Witness ability vanish umbrella: a neat magic trick.
6. River turn: a bend in a river.
7. Cost decide fossil: you’re at a market and see a pretty fossil, but cost would be the deciding factor as you don’t really need a fossil.
8. Engage replace kidney lift ensure: let’s replace their kidney so they can lift things again. Here, there’s more of a stretch, blending at least two images into a sort of mental gif, where images progress from point A to point B.

We now have strands of narrative to work with. Practically all two-word pairings can be used to derive a mental image or narrative, but it is more efficient to group as many words as possible. The above groupings will make sense to some but not to others, it is best to pair them instinctively

Practice these by copying them out repeatedly, in the groupings you created. Start blind-testing yourself early, after your second or third time copying: it will force your brain to engage with the problem rather than just focus on the act of writing. Repeat this for ten to fifteen minutes and you should already see results and be able to recite the narrative you assigned to each group, as well as the words that the narrative represents.

Create Prompts for Each Narrative Grouping

Once you have your narratives memorized for each grouping independently, you need to find a prompt which tells you what the next group will be. A number of options exist, depending on:

a) your personal affinity for types of learning (visual, kinetic, auditory, etc.), and

b) how well your phrase lends itself to each particular technique.

Below are some common approaches but many more exist. If you have trouble finding one that feels comfortable, return to these and simply practice frequently — it will get easier as your brain gets used to the process.

Mnemonic technique

With our example seed, we can try to create an acronym from the first letter of each grouping, giving us CESSWRCE. If it’s pronounceable, you can memorize this and use it to prompt each line. You might sound it out “kess worse”, in this example, but the letter C may be pronounced inconsistently, so evaluate accordingly whether this will work.

It will work for some seeds, but it is a fairly primitive approach. If you do choose to use it, prompt yourself repeatedly on each letter, first in order and then by selecting a letter at random and writing out the associated group.

If the acronym is no good, you can expand it, but you will add yet another layer of complexity. Here, something like “Crypto Education Saves Statoshis Which Rogue Crooks Erase” might serve the purpose, but you must make sure it’s memorable enough that you can recall it with very little effort.

Memory Palace Technique

Popularized by Derren Brown and the BBC’s Sherlock, this is an effective trick for making associations between seemingly unrelated mental images. For this seed, consisting of eight groups, we could imagine a hallway with eight doors, and place imagery from our groupings in each room, making it an experience which we can train ourselves to relive each time we want to recall our seed. Narrate it to yourself in your head, and stress the seed words as you say them, like this:

I walk forward and open the first door on my right, a TV set sits in a dark room playing clips of a hurricane, as the same message scrolls across the screen, over and over, ‘Caution Today!’

Closing the door, I move on and open the next. I see Steve Jobs, the eager gadget artist, taking a sledgehammer to an IBM PC. He has a different view of what technology should be.

The third door opens and I look down upon a valley, with salmon skipping out of the water in droves. What are they whispering to each other, I wonder?

Behind the fourth door, I see a Swiss ski chalet, complete with bearskin rugs and roaring fire, as skiers sit down to lunch.

And so on. It will evolve to be much more concise, as the image becomes more defined in your head. The idea is to take your bubbles of imagination and compartmentalize them in a way that you create an overarching experience. When you later try to recall your phrase, you can take the same trip through your memory.

The more you practice, the easier it will be to tell if you skipped a room or used a synonym. You can always refer to the BIP39 master wordlist if you get stuck and really need to help jog your memory. You must always have your seed written down and safely locked away, so this allows you to leave it where it is and use your memory to restore your wallets, reducing the risk that you lose your backup.

Encoding Narratives in Images

Your seed phrase is incredibly sensitive and it can be risky to codify it using visual clues, such as creating a painting or drawing where elements represent a word or grouping. While it may seem possible to make them so abstract that only you understand them, BIP39 uses a limited bank of 2048 words, meaning that anyone could use that list to guess what the abstraction might refer to.

You should, however, still be keeping a hard copy of your seed in a secure place, in case you lose your hardware wallet. Even though you are explicitly stating your seed phrase, this encourages you to treat it with more caution than if it was ‘secured’ through abstraction in a picture, and therefore is less likely to be exposed to anyone but you.

Never Trust a Memory

Memorizing your seed is not sufficient. You will forget your narratives, mnemonics, and their order, even if you practice them repeatedly and regularly. That said, it is another failsafe to have in case a fire should destroy your paper backup, your Trezor is stolen and you want to move your funds, or if you need to flee persecution. Every Bitcoiner who values their self-sovereignty would do well to try and memorize their seed. It does require practice and discipline, but most people should be able to remember at least 12 words without issue.

You must never rely on a memory as your only backup. A hardware wallet and safely-stored backup will prove much more reliable than your memory, but if you have the patience to memorize it, do so. If this all sounds like too much work, you can always rely on a Trezor Model T with advanced security features such as Shamir’s Secret Sharing and condemn this post to your Memory Oubliette.