The best way BIP 39 wallets are created is to mix the passphrase together with the seed phrase (12/24 phrases) to generate a grasp key, which is then used to derive a hierarchical sequence of personal and public keys. In Bitcoin, you might be allowed to do all of what you might be asking together with:
- Massive variety of characters (theoretically limitless)
- Particular Characters
- Sequence of areas (2 or extra areas again to again)
Though Bitcoin itself doesn’t have constraints as to what you may embody as a passphrase, many implementations of BIP 39 wallets do. You could encounter passphrase size limits based mostly on the pockets implementation, corresponding to Trezor permitting round 50 characters and another wallets allowing extra or fewer characters. It’s advisable to verify the documentation of the precise pockets you’re utilizing earlier than creating your passphrase. Usually, software program wallets like Sparrow and Electrum may have fewer constraints than {hardware} wallets like Trezor and Ledger. Additionally, given that almost all {hardware} wallets don’t retailer the passphrase, it could be tedious to re-enter a 250+ character passphrase each time you wish to entry your bitcoin.
Passphrases present an additional layer of safety that’s compelling to anybody critical about retaining their bitcoin secure. That is as a result of with out the passphrase, an attacker can not entry your funds even when they’ve the seed phrase. It’s vital to be sure that your passphrase is safe and memorable and/or safely saved, as a result of dropping it means everlasting lack of entry to the funds tied to the pockets derived with that passphrase. The seed phrase alone is not going to be sufficient to get well the pockets. As beforehand talked about, it is the mix of the seed and cross phrases that creates the pockets, so the seed phrase alone (or the seed phrase together with a special cross phrase) will create a brand new (most certainly empty) pockets with a special grasp seed and totally different addresses, and so on.
