Forget lists of words and alphanumeric strings: a new Bitcoin tool allows you to hide the key of your coins inside a rainbow.
Bitcoin developer Entero Positivo launched “BIP39Colors” last month, an open source tool that can convert the BIP39 mnemonic string into a set of colors, and vice versa.
“With this method, you can convert your 12-word phrase into 8 colors (or your 24-word phrase into 16 colors),” explains Positivo. to the Decrypt via DM. “Then you can return your colors to your original seed.”
BIP39 is a standard for generating a seed phrase, an ordered set of 12 to 24 words that contains the information needed to create a private key, which is used to generate and -access to a person’s Bitcoin wallet.
The standardization of mnemonic phrases is intended to make it easier for users to recover their crypto if they lose their wallet device, converting their complex private key into a set of readable words.
Most wallet providers now encourage users to write their 12 words on a sheet of paper as a backup, and so that no one can see. As Positivo explains, however, storing a crypto as a list of 12 words is too obvious for hackers or thieves to find the list.
Colors, in contrast, “are everywhere.” A private key can be hidden in plain sight, and a thief would be none the wiser.
“A paper with 12 words is more suspicious than a color palette labeled as ‘my new house wall colors,’ for example, or within a styles.css of your [website],” he said.
The colors generated by the tool are expressed as a hex color code, a six-digit system that represents almost any color as a combination of red, blue, and green. These colors can be stored in “multiple files,” Positivo explains, including HTML, CSS, or the color palette of a PNG.
Unlike the word-based system, one does not need to remember the “order” of the colors to retrieve one’s seed: what matters is that all the colors are present. The developer believes that the flexibility of this storage method could make it harder for governments to seize someone’s Bitcoin.
“You can give one color to your mother, another inside your mother [website]another written in a book on web design … and in the future will recover your seed from these agnostic colors,” he wrote.
The developer also provides instructions on how to decode the BIP39 colors back to their mnemonic phrase with just a calculator, not requiring any external tools.
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