Creating a wallet: the part everyone rushes

Most people meet their wallet for the first time in about ninety seconds. Tap create, glance at some words, tap next, done. It feels like signing up for an app, largely because it looks exactly like signing up for an app.

It isn’t. Those ninety seconds produce the only thing standing between you and your money, and several of the decisions inside them can’t be revisited later. This is the slow version. It’s worth doing once, properly.

Before you tap create

Three things are worth settling before the words appear, because once they do you want your full attention on them.

• Get the app from the right place. Fake wallets turn up in app stores and search ads, and they look right. Follow a link from the project’s own site rather than trusting a search result. Spotting scams before they spot you covers the wider pattern.
• Be somewhere private. Not a café, not a train, not a video call, and definitely not while sharing your screen. Your words will be on display for a few minutes, and a camera over your shoulder is all it takes.
• Have the pen and paper in your hand. Not in a drawer: in your hand. The most common way this goes wrong is starting the flow, seeing the words, and deciding to write them down in a minute.

Twelve words or twenty-four?

The app will offer you a choice. Both options are far past the point where anyone could guess them, for reasons worth understanding once. Twenty-four words buy margin against a distant future. Twelve are half as much to write down, check, and store correctly.

That second point carries more weight than it first appears. Almost nobody loses coins to a guessed phrase. People lose coins to a backup that was rushed, miscopied, or never finished. If twelve words means you actually complete the backup and verify it, then twelve words is the safer choice for you. Move to twenty-four once the routine is familiar and the amounts justify it.

Write them down before you tap next

The screen showing your phrase is the one screen in the app you should treat as a live wire. Write the words in order, numbered, on paper. Then read them back against the screen once, slowly.

Spelling matters more than you’d expect. The standard word list contains near-twins, and a wallet can hinge on whether you wrote ridge or rigid. Where your handwriting could be ambiguous a year from now, print instead of scrawling.

Take the verification quiz seriously

Most wallets ask for a few words back before they’ll call you backed up. With the phrase still one screen away it’s tempting to treat that as a formality. It isn’t. It’s the only moment the app can tell you your copy is wrong while that’s still a cheap problem to have.

If you catch yourself wanting to flick back and check, that’s the quiz doing exactly its job. Fix your paper copy, then start the check again.

Rehearse the recovery, with nothing at stake

Here is the step almost nobody takes, and the one that would prevent most real losses.

Before you put anything meaningful into the wallet, restore it from your written words. Delete the wallet and enter the phrase again, or type it into a second wallet app on another device. If the same addresses come back, your backup works. If they don’t, you’ve just found out on a wallet holding nothing, which is the cheapest possible moment to find out.

The only backup you can trust is one you have already used.

Do it once, now. You won’t need to do it again unless the phrase changes.

Fund it slowly

Send a small amount in, then send some of it back out to another address you control. That exercises the whole loop rather than just the receiving half. Sending Bitcoin without the cold sweat walks through the sending ritual itself. Once the round trip works, move the rest.

What to leave for later, on purpose

Passphrases, multisignature setups, decoy wallets, inheritance plans: every one of these is genuinely useful, and none of them belongs in your first ten minutes. Each extra layer is another thing to back up, remember, and lock yourself out of. A setup you half understand is more dangerous than a simple one you’ve mastered.

• A passphrase or a decoy wallet, when the threat you care about is a person standing in front of you: see decoy wallets, duress PINs, and the $5 wrench.
• Multisig, when no single device should be able to move the money on its own. Covered in that same article.
• Cold storage, when the amount outgrows the phone in your pocket: see hot, cold, and hardware wallets.
• An inheritance plan, once there’s enough at stake for it to matter to somebody else: see what happens to your Bitcoin when you die.