Ever dreamt of having your personal color palette specially made from your mnemonic phrase? An open-source tool, titled BIP39Colors, launched last month by a Bitcoin developer Entero Positivo, can convert a BIP39 mnemonic phrase into a series of colors and vice versa.
Positivo explained: “With this method, you can convert your 12-word phrase to 8 colors (or your 24-word phrase to 16 colors). Then you can convert your colors back to your original seed.”
Twitter: @EnteroPositivo
The seed phrase for the private key is classically generated with the BIP39 protocol and is either a set of 12 or 24 words long, that is used to access the Bitcoin wallet.
The purpose of standardizing mnemonic phrases was to simplify the process of recovery for users in the event of wallet device loss. This involves transforming their complex private key into a collection of easily understandable words.
While many wallet providers advise users to write down their 12-word mnemonic phrase on paper as a backup, Positivo highlights the vulnerability of this method. Storing crypto as a straightforward list of 12 words can easily be detected by hackers or thieves who happen to come across the list. He implied that colors are everywhere, and on the contrary can be hidden in plain sight, without thieves even noticing.
Positivo said:
“A paper with 12 words is more suspicious than a color palette labeled like 'my new home wall colors,' for example, or inside a styles.css of your website.”
The tool generates colors using a six-digit hexadecimal code. The hex color code represents the combination of the three primary colors – red, green, and blue, and can be stored across multiple files, in the HTML or CSS of a website, or as a color palette of a PNG.
The main difference between the color method and the word method is that you don't need to remember the order of colors to recover the seed, all you need is to have all the colors. The more flexible approach can prove it harder for government organizations and malicious users to get their hands on someone’s crypto.
Positivo wrote:
“You can give one color to your mother, another inside your website, another one written in a web design book... and in the future recover your seed from these agnostic colors.”
A user on tweeter asked about Positivo’s tool, to whom he promptly replied:
In addition, he provided the instructions for decoding the BIP39 colors back into the mnemonic phrase with just a calculator and no external tools.
