New Mnemonics For Memorizing Bitcoin Seed Phrases

This is an opinion editorial by Thorbjørn König, a principal product designer with a sole focus on creating great user experiences for bitcoin products and services.

One of the more curious features of bitcoin is that if you are able to memorize 12 or 24 words, known as a recovery phrase or seed phrase, you can essentially hold your bitcoin in your head.

The motivation behind creating a mnemonic phrase, complementing the existing and not so human-friendly, binary and hexadecimal representation of the seed, was to create a group of easy to remember words, which could easily be written on paper or spoken over the phone.

The introduction of the mnemonic phrase has given rise to a wealth of self-custody products and services — the reasoning being that you should never be relying on your memory alone to access your wealth.

These self-custody products and services come with a set of security and user experience challenges themselves.

We have been developing for a specific challenge — secure encoding, storing and retrieval of a string of words, providing solutions for people that are mostly logical-mathematical oriented.

People are different though, and for a subset of people it is easier to memorize musical tones, shapes, objects or motion, than it is to memorize words. For these people, new mnemonics, such as musical or spatial mnemonics — would present a more meaningful user experience.

New mnemonics would require novel self-custody solutions for secure encoding, storing and retrieval of information — presenting a new opportunity for software and hardware developers and designers.

Brains

Having an understanding of our strengths and weaknesses, preferences and aversions, can help us single out individual tools for learning and memorizing.

Our brain, consciousness and understanding of self, is one of the most contended spaces of contemporary science — and pop-culture alike.

Following this is some of the thinking behind personality types, learning and memory — which can assist us in building new mnemonics and the accompanying self-custody solutions.

Although not entirely conclusive or unanimously accepted by the scientific community, there is something here worth our attention.

Left-Brained Versus Right-Brained

Psychobiologist Roger Sperry discovered that our brain has specialized functions on both hemispheres, and that the two sides can operate practically independently — for example he discovered that language was controlled by the left-side of the brain. He shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his split-brain research.

Over the years this has been over-generalized by popular psychology, stating that people are either left-brained or right-brained.

More recent research suggests that while the brain’s hemispheres have distinct processing styles, mental processes are shared among both sides — they do not function exclusively, but complementarity.

For example, math abilities are strongest when both brain hemispheres work together.

Still, the left brain hemispheres tend to manage many aspects of language and logic, while the right brain hemispheres tend to manage spatial information and visual comprehension. And most people have, if not a dominant brain hemisphere, then at least a distinct individual preference for activities related to one of the two brain hemispheres.