To date, I've never experienced anything this risky, and I hope I'm always protected from such negligence or carelessness as it's a stressful mistake especially if you have a lot of assets.

In the world of Bitcoin the two most fatal mistakes that can lead to significant losses are a lack of patience (haste), and underestimating wallet security (especially the seed phrase). Therefore, I always prioritize thoroughness when writing my seed phrase, repeating it several times, verifying it letter by letter to avoid errors, and backing it up to several secure locations. Always remember that Bitcoin doesn't forgive mistakes especially when it comes to wallet security, but it also offers substantial rewards for those who keep their wallets secure.

I consider this a mistake when you store your mnemonic recovery words on a device that is used regularly and which very likely is an online device. This leaves the recovery words exposed on a device that can be infected by malware and where you therefore can loose control over your backup. DO NOT store your recovery words and maybe an additional mnemonic passphrase on online devices.


This thread isn't about individual private keys and possibly missing some characters from them. It's about issues with the backup of a deterministic wallet where the recovery words and possibly a few other details (like address type, derivation path, etc.) are normally sufficient to recreate all private keys of a wallet.


If someone isn't able to write down 12 or 24 words error-free in the correct and reproducible order, then I'd argue this person shouldn't touch crypto coins at all. It isn't rocket science exactly when you're aware of the importance of such a backup and handle it accordingly.

You can avoid such issues as brought up here, when you properly verify that your can recover the exact same wallet that you initially created solely from your backup. If you skip this verification step, you're using your wallet on hope alone.


JayJuanGee already addressed this and I want to add my few bits. You gave up sovereign control of your recovery words backup to some picture cloud. Remember that a "cloud" is just someone else's computer(s), well definitely not yours anymore?

Have you ever read the terms of such picture clouds and remembered what's in those terms? You hope the cloud owner will never feed your pictures to some AI training or never loose pictures to hackers or someone else browsing your pictures when you let them do it? Some picture clouds or gallery apps offer "comfort" functions like automatic classification of picture content. You hope this is done locally only on your device?

This is basically the same (or rather worse) as storing your mnemonic recovery backup on a regularly used online device.


Seriously? Your pants pocket isn't exactly the safest place to store your mnemonic recovery words backup. I'm aware that your case likely wasn't intentional, but it shows quite some negligence to proper handle, transport and safely store your backup.

I'm just highlighting that you were quite careless with your written backup and I hope for you it wasn't your common way of handling such sensitive data.


You could add a simple verification step that your backup is sufficient to recover the same wallet that you created initially. Solves basically most later recovery issues or backup errors.


If you need or want a (house-)fire-proof backup, then stamping your recovery words into appropriately fire-resistant metal isn't a bad idea. On the other hand it's not really mandatory if you have redundant copies of your paper backup at different locations, then it's not likely to loose all of them in some fire or water hazard situation.

Of course, it depends on how sure you can be about the safety of your backup storage at those different locations (e.g. could just be one at your work place and/or at one of your relatives or persons you can trust to store a sealed envelope or small box).

It's a very bad and dangerous habit especially if people have settings on their phones for automated synchronization their photos to their email and related cloud service such as Gmail and Google Photos.

It's hard to realize that if their phones were set like that a long time, and the synced photos as screenshots of wallet mnemonic seeds will have probability of online exploitation in the future. Their gmail can be hacked, their Google Photos can be accessed by hackers and with AI tools for powerful and quick scans to find valuable and sensitive things, hackers can steal bitcoins easily.

I don't claim to be the most sophisticated user of various electronic devices, whether we are referring to phones or other devices, yet it seems like so frequently, I come to my device and one or another setting had been changed from what I had originally set it, which sometimes might happen with an update, and sometimes it seems to happen with some random event that I cannot figure out the cause of why the setting got changed.  Also some services seem like they try to trick us into changing our settings and/or the services that we opt-in for, so we could accidentally opt into a service (or a setting) that we had not intended to opt into.

I also had some accounts of mine that were gotten into, in the past, by hackers, and so they end up seeing some information and settings and even some communications that I would have had never intended a malicious actor to see, and maybe I even thought that I had taken all of the best security precautions, but then they find some loophole that I never even considered to be within possibilities, yet then once the loophole is exploited, then the vulnerability seems more obvious since it had specifically ended up happening.

In the hacking incident that I went through, I had gotten an alert within a few minutes of the hack happening, and I even took measures to lock out the hackers, but once they had gotten in, they had kept getting back in, even when I extracted them, which is even more spookie since each time that they got in, after I had locked them out, they were able to do more and more damage, and the lucky part was that I was available, and the unlucky part was that I really had limitations on measures that I could take to stop them since they were increasing their number of doors after each time getting back in without my really recognizing the level of danger or how I could even stop it.  Not a good experience.


I doubt that you can be smug about the particular kind of mistake that OP ended up making, since maybe OP was a bit of a dummy, and maybe he was a bit careless and rushed, yet at the same time, there are all kind of mistakes, and even writing your whole seed phrases in multiple locations is not without its own trade-offs in terms of your own needs to make sure that each and everyone one of the location of those seed phrases are sufficiently protected that no one who is unauthorized ever even gets a peep at your seeds, and even if you authorize certain persons under certain conditions, there can be potential problems with that too.. so guys need to be careful in their accusing other members of being dummies, merely based on the kind (and perhaps the level of dumbness?) of their earlier mistake(s).

I think I did something similar on writing a private key on my notebook where I keep it my passwords and accounts, I did make some wrong spellings on seed phrase but I ended up fixing it, and figuring it out easily and correcting it when writing the backup.

Actually you could just do a bunch of words and try it and on some wallet it is going to actually login but it doesn't mean that it has funds on it, unless you find your actual account. I don't really understand how that works, I think it was on myetherwallet where you could just paste it change some words and it is still going to login, does it mean that the wallet was already all created.