About & editorial policy
Seed Phrase Field Guide is an independent, free educational guide to storing seed phrases and private keys: backups, hardware wallets, randomness, splitting schemes and planning for death or incapacity. This page explains what the guide is, how it is written and checked, and what happens when we get something wrong.
What this guide is, and is not Beginner
| The guide is | The guide is not |
|---|---|
| General education that explains options, trade-offs and pitfalls, with sources | Financial, legal, tax or security advice for your situation |
| A set of static pages you can read without an account | A wallet, an app, a shop or a service that holds anything for you |
| A neutral directory that names products so you can research them | A ranking that tells you which product to buy |
| A record of real failures, so you can learn from them | A promise that any method is safe in every case |
Who it is for. Pages and sections are marked Beginner, Intermediate or Expert, so a newcomer can stop at the basics and an experienced holder can go straight to the detail. The learning paths explain the levels.
Where it applies. The guide is written for readers everywhere, but the law and tax sections cover the United Kingdom (England and Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland) and the United States first and in most depth, then other countries. See the UK, US and rest of the world estate guides. Laws differ, so treat any country summary as a starting point for a conversation with a qualified professional.
Who publishes it Beginner
Seed Phrase Field Guide is published as a project, not under a personal name. The person behind it has chosen to stay anonymous, and we say so openly rather than inventing a persona. Being publicly linked to cryptocurrency can make someone a target for phishing, impersonation and physical threats (see the case files and safety guide), and the guide recommends the same caution to readers.
Because there is no named author to vouch for the content, every substantive claim is meant to stand on its sources. If a statement on this site has no source and is not clearly marked as our own reasoning or arithmetic, treat that as a gap and check it elsewhere.
How we choose sources Intermediate
We prefer the source closest to the fact. In rough order:
- Standards and specifications, such as the BIP and SLIP documents, NIST publications and reference code.
- Law and regulators: statutes on legislation.gov.uk and state legislatures, GOV.UK, HMRC, the FCA, the IRS, FinCEN, the Uniform Law Commission and their equivalents elsewhere.
- Makers' own documentation and security advisories, for what a product does and what its maker says to do about a fault.
- Independent tests and research, such as published fire, crush and corrosion tests of metal backups, security-lab findings and academic papers.
- Reputable reporting, used for events where no primary statement exists or the primary statement is thin, and named in the text.
- Community advice from experienced practitioners, forums and guides. It is often the most practical material, so we include it, but we label it as community advice and do not present it as established fact.
Where sources disagree, we show both sides and say which is which. Figures that come only from third parties (for example, loss estimates after a hack) are labelled as third-party estimates. Things we could not verify are left out, or marked as unverified with the reason. Every page lists its sources, and Sources & disclaimer collects them in one place.
How strong is the evidence? Our grading scale Intermediate
Not all evidence is equal. A maker calling a plate "fireproof" is not the same as an independent tester putting it through a fire and publishing whether the words could still be read. We use the five grades below, from strongest to weakest, to describe where a claim comes from.
| Grade | What it means | Example |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Independent test | Someone with no stake in the product tested it and published the method and results. | Published heat and crush tests of metal backup plates |
| 2. Primary documentation | The rule or fact as stated at its origin: a standard, a statute, a regulator's guidance, or a maker's technical documentation or security advisory about its own product. | The BIP39 specification; a statute's text; a maker's firmware advisory |
| 3. Maker claim | A maker's statement about how good its product is, not checked independently. Maker claims are not test results. | "Fireproof", "military-grade", "unhackable" |
| 4. Community report | Experience or advice shared by users and practitioners, sometimes widely agreed, but not formally tested. | Forum consensus on how to label backups |
| 5. Unverified | A claim we found but could not confirm from a source we could read. Mentioned only when it matters, and always marked. | A detail reported only second-hand |
A higher grade is not automatically right for you: a primary document tells you what a rule says, not how a court will apply it to your facts. Since 25 October 2026 the most important claims carry a badge showing their grade, using exactly this scale. Each badge has a text label, so it does not rely on colour, and links back to this section:
Grade 1 Independent test Grade 2 Primary documentation Grade 3 Maker claim Grade 4 Community report Grade 5 Unverified
- Where you will see badges: metal backup durability and fire claims (physical storage and the method comparison), hardware wallet security claims (wallets & devices), randomness claims (randomness & entropy), the security advisories and every directory entry that cites a source of its own.
- A badge grades the source, not the product. "Grade 1" means the claim rests on a published independent test, not that the product is good. A Grade 3 maker claim may well be true; it just has not been checked by someone without a stake.
- We grade only what the cited source supports. If a claim has no badge, the evidence is described in words next to it. Directory badges are worked out from the sources each entry already cites (for example, Jameson Lopp's published stress tests count as independent tests; a maker's own documentation counts as primary documentation).
Who published it? Source-type labels Intermediate
Evidence grades describe how strong a claim is. Source-type labels describe who published a source, so you can see at a glance whether a list leans on makers, regulators or independent voices. Since 25 October 2026 each link in our sources lists (the sources page and the "Primary sources" section at the end of each guide) carries one of these labels:
| Label | Who it covers | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | A company writing about its own products or services: wallet and backup makers, exchanges, custodians, banks and software firms, including their security teams | Trezor, Ledger, Coinbase, Casa |
| Independent | Researchers, journalists, academics and security firms writing about products they do not sell | Jameson Lopp's tests, Milk Sad research, Reuters, arXiv papers |
| Non-profit | Charities, standards bodies and non-profit legal or consumer organisations | EFF, ISO, Uniform Law Commission, Age UK |
| Government/regulator | Governments, tax authorities, regulators, courts, law commissions and official legislation sites | GOV.UK and HMRC, the FCA, the IRS, legislation.gov.uk |
| Legal/professional | Law firms, professional bodies and legal publishers | Law Society of Scotland, Farrer & Co, American Bar Association |
| Community | Open, volunteer-run projects and forums, including the Bitcoin Improvement Proposals repository | BIPs on GitHub, the Bitcoin Wiki, Wallets Recovery |
Checked on · labels applied by the build from a fixed list of domains
- A label is not a grade. A vendor's technical documentation about its own device is often the best source for how that device works (Grade 2 above); the label just tells you who wrote it.
- How labels are assigned: by the website's domain (and, for GitHub, the account that publishes the repository), using a fixed list kept in our build. A domain that is not on the list gets no label rather than a guess.
- Edge cases: a company's research about another company's product is still labelled Vendor (for example, Ledger Donjon); news outlets count as Independent.
Independence and money Beginner
- No affiliate links. Product links carry no affiliate or referral codes, and we earn nothing if you buy.
- No sponsors and no paid placements. Nobody pays to be listed, ranked, reviewed or left out.
- No advertising. There are no adverts on any page.
- Products are named only for education. Inclusion in the directory or a comparison is not an endorsement, and leaving something out is not a criticism. Product and company names are trademarks of their owners.
Safety rules for the site itself Beginner
- Nothing on this site asks for, accepts, stores or generates a seed phrase, passphrase or private key. There are no forms and no accounts.
- No real or usable seed phrase appears anywhere. Examples and people in scenarios are fictional.
- Printable templates are meant to be printed blank and filled in by hand, and the checklist ticks are stored only in your own browser.
- Any page, message or person claiming to be from Seed Phrase Field Guide and asking for your recovery words is a scam.
Analytics. The site counts visits with cookieless Cloudflare Web Analytics, and uses Google Analytics only if you accept analytics cookies in the banner. A content-security policy blocks connections to anywhere else. Full details, and how to change your choice: Cookies & privacy.
How pages are checked and dated Intermediate
- "Checked on" and "checked" notes on a page, section or table give the date the facts there were last compared with their sources. Prices always carry the date they were read from the maker's store.
- "Last reviewed" at the foot of each page is the date of the last general review of the page as a whole.
- Stamps under tables and sections on the main guide pages show one of two labels. A solid "✓ Checked on" stamp means the facts there were compared with their cited sources on that date. A dashed "Last reviewed" stamp means the material was last revised on that date but has not yet been re-checked line by line, so treat it with more care. Prices are shown as rounded ranges (for example "about £40–£55"), next to the exact price listed on the maker's store and the date it was read. The site's build refuses to publish a stamp dated in the future or more than a year old.
- Links are checked across the whole site. Links that move are updated to the new address, and dead links are replaced with an equivalent source or removed.
- Fast-moving topics (firmware advisories, prices, exchange policies, tax thresholds) are re-checked more often than settled ones such as how the BIP39 checksum works.
- Before publishing, every page is checked for broken internal links, accessibility problems in light and dark mode and valid structured data.
A date tells you when we last looked, not that nothing has changed since. Always confirm anything important with the official source.
How corrections work Beginner
- A mistake is found, by our own re-checks, by a link or fact check, or by a reader.
- We check it against the best available source from the list above, rather than simply swapping one claim for another.
- The page is fixed, and any other page that repeated the error is fixed at the same time.
- Substantive corrections are logged on the Corrections log with the date, the page, what was wrong and what changed. We do not quietly rewrite history.
Corrections are reviewed regularly. There is no public way to report an error yet; one will be added, and this page will say how when it is. It will never be a form that asks for anything sensitive, and you should never send anyone your seed words to "prove" a point.
Not advice
Last reviewed: · Educational information only — verify current details with official sources.