From now on, store the private keys of your Bitcoin wallet as colors

Forget about memorizing your 12-word recovery phrase or private key to your Bitcoin wallet. A new backup tool allows you to restore your wallet if you lose it with a combination of colors.

According to DeCrypt, a Bitcoin developer named Entero Positivo introduced the “BIP39Colors” standard last month. An open source tool that can convert a BIP39 mnemonic into a sequence of colors and vice versa.

Positivo said about this new tool:

With this method, you can turn your 12-word recovery phrase into 8 colors (or your 24-word phrase into 16 colors). Then it will be possible to convert the colors into the recovery phrase (Seed Phrase).

The BIP39 standard is a tool for generating recovery statements; An ordered set of 12 to 24 words that contains the information needed to create a private key that can be used to create and access a Bitcoin wallet.

The purpose of standardizing Mnemonic Phrases was to enable users to easily recover their digital currencies if they lost their wallets and convert the complex alphanumeric phrase string of their private key into a set of readable words.

Today, most cryptocurrency wallet developers require users to write their 12-word recovery phrase on a piece of paper and keep it in a safe place. However, when hackers or thieves find this 12-word list, they will clearly know it’s a cryptocurrency wallet, Positivo explained.

In contrast, we use colors everywhere. As a result, you can hide your private key in plain sight. He added:

A piece of paper with a 12-word phrase written on it draws more attention than a color palette that could be the wall colors of your new home or the color codes of your website.

The colors produced by this tool are represented as a 6-digit color code that represents almost any color as a combination of the three colors red, blue, and green. These colors can be saved as HTML, CSS, or a color palette in PNG format, Positivo said.

Unlike a word-based system, you don’t need to remember the order of the colors to retrieve the private key. The only important thing 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 people’s bitcoins.

You can tell your mom the name of one color, save another color on your website, write another color in the corner of a book… and retrieve your wallet in the future using these unrelated colors.

This developer also explained to users how to decode and convert BIP39 colors into a reminder phrase using only a calculator and without the need for any other tools.