Restoring the wallet

Developers
1

Hi,

When I have my coins in my wallet, can I do the following:

  1. Restore wallet with seed: If I have my 12-word seed (which I have printed on a piece of paper), can I restore the entire balance of that wallet on any system, Windows or Linux, merely by that 12 words. I’m interested in knowing that, if my software wallet is lost in a hard drive failure or just gone (regardless of the reason)?

  2. Paper wallet: If I have by ADA coins in a software wallet, can I safely send them to a paper wallet, which is basically just another wallet (just on paper, instead of software), will I be able to restore it later on with the 27 words. The reason I’m asking is because I used to have the older version of paper wallet that had less words (now sure how much exactly, maybe 22), but I was unable to restore that wallet on the newer version of daedalus. I don’t want to have funds on the paper wallet if I won’t be able to restore them in a year when the software will change again which will render things incompatible. How far is the paper wallet, can it be actually used?

  3. Why does the software wallet use 12-word seed, which can be used to restore the wallet, while the paper wallet has 27 words. Shouldn’t they both use the 27 words for restoration purposes?

2

I will try to address your questions:

  1. Yes. That’s the beauty of crypto. If you have your secret words you can install them on any machine.

  2. Yes, you can safely send your ADA to your paper wallet and keep them there. If you want to use your paper wallet again, you can make it hot again by restoring it. I am not familiar with original paper wallets but I do not think you would have problems with paper wallet restoration in the future software releases.

  3. It’s a security issue. For a hot wallet you don’t need more than 12 words. The 20+ word selection in paper wallet just protects you better, which is what paper wallets are designed for.