← Entropy Atlas
Secret & unpredictable
Wallet seeds & recovery phrases
A compact root secret deterministically derives many cryptocurrency keys.
Evaluation card
What “plenty” means here.
- Required property
- A standards-conforming seed from a trusted cryptographic generator, protected like the assets it controls.
- If it fails
- One weak or exposed root can compromise every derived address, now and later.
- Relevant attacker
- Offline guessers, malicious wallet software, supply-chain attackers, and anyone who can observe the backup.
- The Plenty Line
- Match the wallet standard and the security level of the derived keys; use the full generated phrase and prescribed checksum.
- Why more is not automatically better
- Adding personal words or home-made shuffling can introduce bias and incompatibility instead of strength.
Where it appears
Recognize the pattern.
- 01HD-wallet master seeds
- 02mnemonic recovery phrases
- 03hardware-wallet initialization
The Plentropy rule
Protect the requirement, then stop.
Match the wallet standard and the security level of the derived keys; use the full generated phrase and prescribed checksum.
Once that claim has comfortable evidence and margin, improve the next limiting factor instead of worshipping a larger entropy number.