Help the vault survive

A seed phrase encoded with one of our ciphers can only be decoded with that cipher. If this site disappears and the tomes with it, the numbers on your receipt are numbers. We built the vault so that can't happen: the ciphers are public, signed, zipped, torrented and mirrored, and the rule on the home page is to keep your own copy. This page is for the people who want to go further and make sure a copy exists that doesn't depend on us.

What the vault is

Five tomes, one zip each, about 98 MB apiece:

Tome	Years	Ciphers
en-bip39-1770-1774	1770 to 1774	1,826
en-bip39-1775-1779	1775 to 1779	1,826
en-bip39-1780-1784	1780 to 1784	1,827
en-bip39-2000-2004	2000 to 2004	1,827
en-bip39-2005-2009	2005 to 2009	1,826

Each zip unpacks to an html folder and a txt folder with an encode and a decode file for every day, about 7,300 files and 250 MB. Every zip has a .sign file made with the site's key, so a copy from anywhere can be checked. Every zip and every signature has a torrent and a magnet link. All of it is linked from the en-bip39 page and lives on the vault host, vault.bitcoinseedbook.com, which keeps no access logs.

Seed the torrents

Each torrent carries a web seed pointing at our own copy of the file, so a download always has a source even when nobody else is seeding. That keeps the torrents working today. It does nothing for the day our copy is gone. A torrent survives that day only if other people are seeding it, which means keeping the file and the client running after the download finishes.

1. Download the ten torrent files from the en-bip39 page, or use the magnet links. Five are zips, five are the signatures (tiny; seed them too, they are the proof).
2. Open them in a client. qBittorrent and Transmission are free, open source, and run on all three operating systems.
3. Let the downloads finish, then verify the zips against the signatures before you do anything else. A torrent is only as good as the file it was made from, and a verified zip is the only kind worth seeding.
4. Turn off the client's ratio limit for these torrents. Most clients stop seeding once you have uploaded as much as you downloaded; for the vault you want no limit. In qBittorrent that is the per-torrent "Share ratio limit" or the global one under Options, BitTorrent; in Transmission it is "Stop seeding at ratio" in Preferences.
5. Leave the client running. A client that runs on a home server or a NAS and starts on boot is a seed that lasts. A client on a laptop that is closed at night is a seed that is mostly off.

A seeder on a different continent, on a different network, with a different reason to keep the files, is what a torrent needs. If you run one, you don't have to tell us. If you'd like to, the address is on the home page.

Run a mirror

A mirror is a copy of the ten files, verified, on a web server or a file-sharing service, with the link posted somewhere people can find it. The en-bip39 page lists the copies we know about, under "File Sharing Sites". They range from a GitHub repository to free file hosts, and that mix is deliberate: no single company controls where the tomes can be had.

If you put up a mirror:

• Mirror the signatures next to the zips, and the public key next to both. A mirror without the signatures is a pile of zips that nobody can trust.
• Don't re-zip, rename, or "clean up" the files. A re-zipped tome fails verification. Serve the exact bytes.
• Post the fingerprint of the key with the files:

6a273eeff6fa3a6e9a44fac12394b6bfa991c7576222f508d9ad019d2227234d

• Tell us the link, so it can go on the list.

Keep a copy that lasts

Most readers won't seed or mirror, and don't need to. What everyone who uses a cipher needs is a copy of the tome their cipher is in, somewhere they can reach in twenty years. The rules are the ones for any long-term file:

• Two copies on two kinds of media: a USB stick and a hard drive, a hard drive and a cloud account, a disc and a stick. Media fail in different ways.
• The signature and the key stored with each copy, so you can confirm the copy before you decode with it.
• Download more tomes than you use. Nobody can tell from five zips which day is yours.
• Check the copies every year or two: plug them in, run the verify command, copy to fresh media when the old is getting old.

We will never ask for a seed word or a passphrase, and you should never type one into this site or any tool it links to. Nothing on this page needs a seed word, and the tomes are public files that anyone can hold.

Why we don't just put it on a blockchain

People ask. A tome is 98 MB zipped. Bitcoin's chain is the wrong place for 500 MB of lookup tables, and the ciphers are worth exactly as much as their availability, which torrents and mirrors already provide at no cost to anyone. The signatures do the job a chain would do, proving the files are ours, with a key you can check by hand.

Sources