Proof Collective Sessions: Wallet Security

The only thing you need to know is that your job in life is to keep your seed phrase, make it so only you know it and nobody else knows it ... If your seed phase becomes known to another person, that's a state change to the universe. There's nothing you can do. You can't change any passwords. You can't move it anywhere. It is now known, and you cannot put that Genie back in the bottle.

The seed phrase is a single, central, core secret. And then, using math—the math is actually called Bip44—what you can do is you can run math on that seed phrase to generate you an account ... An Ethereum account is an address a public key and a private key. So, account 1 has an address, public key, private key. Account 2 has an address, public key, private key. And you can generate as many of those as you like.

The idea that you can see your seed phrase in plain text on your computer screen should make you scratch your head ... That means this seed phrase is now clean text, visible on a device that's connected to the Internet that could be running arbitrary software ... That seed phrase, no matter what you do or how you treat it from that point onward, it can only get to, like, a 3 out of 10 on the security level.

The way you handle your seed phrase is equivalent to your security level. The more exposure your seed phrase has been given in its lifetime, the more likely you are to be hacked—for somebody else to know your seed phrase and take your money.

The premise of cryptography, in general, is that you have a secret number that nobody else has, and the person who owns that secret number can cryptographically sign messages on behalf of your account.