FAQ

🔗 Aren’t “brain wallets” a bad idea?

A: If you have a bad memory, a high-degree of physical security and political stability where you live then yes, they are! As explained by the Bitcoin Wiki here “brainwallets are not recommended to be used in general because of fallible human memory. But in special situations they could be very useful, for example when fleeing a country as a refugee with only the clothes on your back”. If you live in a political hot zone or shared accommodation, or if you travel around a lot (nomadic) or seek to find additional ways to carry your seed words with either in your home country or over international borders, then Border Wallets provides you with an easier and more reliable way of generating and memorising Bitcoin seed words vs traditional brain wallet methods, e.g. Memory Palaces. Border Wallets can also be used in unison with existing Bitcoin wallet set-ups to provide you with he option to memorise your wallet if your situation suddenly changes.

It is worth noting that Border Wallets also have use cases beyond memorisation (explained in our Use Cases sections).

🔗 How are Border Wallets different from Memory Palaces?

A: Memory Palaces are another viable way of memorising seed words, and could actually be applied to Entropy Grids - where a user “journey” is constructed using cell co-ordinates. In the absense of an entropy grid, however, the Memory Palace method requires users to create a mnemonic for each word in order to recall them at a later date. With Border Wallets, the user is not required to memorise any seed words except for the Checksum (final word) or - using our Final Word Number feature - its corresponding ‘number’ which the EGG can use to remind users of the final word at a later time. Our focus with Border Wallets was to create the most simple, secure and most importantly reliable method for memorising seed words and recalling them at a later date. We do this by exploiting the Picture Superiority effect and calling on the user to only remember a Pattern and one seed word/number, and not 12, 24 or more.

🔗 How much entropy is there in the pattern or the system as a whole?

A: If you are asking if there is more security in Border Wallet because there is more entropy than regular seed generation, then that is not really the point. We set out to make a system that had at least as much entropy but provided an easier way to memorise a seed.

All of the entropy in your Border Wallet is derived from the Entropy Grid unless you use a good source of entropy to generate your pattern. There is usually no real entropy in the pattern because we are human, and tend to apply memorable patterns to things which may make them predictable. Entropy is the measure of randomness and true randomness is very hard to remember. Patterns need to be remembered so they need to be - in most use cases - memorable and not random.

There are ways of making your pattern less easy to guess if your Entropy Grid is discovered by an evil maid. For example:

• making a pattern that isn’t so obvious to guess (see our demo video for one example)
• selecting your pattern cells in an order that is less guessable to others (but you will remember!)
• likewise, don’t be predictable where you place your pattern on the page(s) of your grid (i.e. beginning on cell A1 may be obvious)
• creating multiple ‘dummy’ Entropy Grids and storing these - either physically or digitally - alongside your chosen Entropy Grid(s)
• using Gridception

If you are creating or using Border Wallets for legacy planning purposes, however, there may be no need to create a ‘memorable’ pattern as the person you leave the cell coordinates with may want to write them down. In this case, the extent to which you introduce entropy may be significantly higher.