What is a Brain Wallet? How to Create for any Cryptocurrency Instantly?

If you are in cryptocurrency world for a while now, then you must be knowing about the importance of a secure Bitcoin wallet.

It’s not been many days that I shared some of the best Bitcoin wallets that one can use to protect his cryptocurrency. In that post, I discussed various Hardware Wallet, Mobile Wallet, Paper Wallet, Online Wallet etc.

But for a long time, I was willing to share another type of wallet called ‘Brain Wallet‘ which allows you to store your cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin.

Sounds interesting?

Let’s start, Without any further ado!

Brain Wallet

Brain Wallet? What is that?

As the name suggests, Brain wallets are a type of wallets where user store/memorize the mnemonic recovery phrase in their brain.

The private key of the wallet address is derived from mnemonic recovery phrase. Since a private key is a string of alphabets and numbers, it is difficult to remember.

A Brain Wallet is the one when user remembers their mnemonic phrase or the private key and never write it down.

What is brain wallet

This might seem easy but trust me it is not like wise. If the user dies or forgets the mnemonic phrase or get mentally paralyzed, the crypto-coins associated with that wallet will be lost forever.

How Does a Brain Wallet Work?

For the ease of understanding, I will take an example of Bitcoin to explain the working of a Brain wallet.

A Bitcoin Brain Wallet generator allows the users to enter random words. These could be 4,6,8,12,14 words and is called a paraphrase. This paraphrase is then hashed with SHA-256 or Scrypt algorithm to generate a Bitcoin Private Key and a Public Key.

Moreover, The type of hashing depends upon the generator tool you use. However, The harder and random the paraphrase is, more will be the difficulty to decode it.

Once you have created your Public Key and Private key after hashing the paraphrase. You can simply store your crypto without worrying about the security. This is because the private key can only be created back with the paraphrase which is in your Brain. And I believe no one could hack your brain. 😉

How Can You Create a Brain Wallet?

Creating a Brain Wallet is really very easy and quick. You just need a 4, 8, 10, 12, 14 random words i.e. a paraphrase.

But before creating a paraphrase you need to make that it is difficult enough. Because if it is not difficult enough and someone is able to recreate it, then all your funds will be flushed out of the wallet within seconds.

There is a term called Brute Force attack, where attackers try to guess the paraphrase until they hit it right. So, your paraphrase should be complex and hard enough that it could not be guessed even with Brute-force-attack.

However, there are a few ways to generate a paraphrase.

Ways to Generate a Paraphrase:

  1. Create a random paraphrase by the words which you can easily recall or making a story for words.
    It was a really great day at work + While coming back to home + I witnessed an accident + I helped the injured and took him to the Hospital + He was immediately taken for the treatment + He recovered within 6 months.
    So the paraphrase, in this case, is [great home witnessed hospital immediately recovered]
  2. You can use a Software wallet like Mycelium, Electrum etc to create a paraphrase and you can memorize it
  3. You can use a software wallet to create a paraphrase and then add ‘Salt‘ to it. Hence making it more difficult to guess.
  4. The best way is to use an image, excel, text file, mp3 or any format of the file and add ‘Salt’ to it to generate the phrase. In this case, you need to keep the original file with extreme care, if the file is deleted then your Bitcoins will be gone forever.

Here I would recommend you to try 2nd,3rd or the 4th way because the 1st one is created by human and Humans are predictable. So, To reduce the vulnerability of your precious funds, try to use a complicated paraphrase.

If you are thinking that you are the smartest person in the world and no one could even guess your paraphrase, that’s good but there have been cases where people have lost their BTC from brain wallet.

One such case can be seen on this Reddit thread where a user lost 4 BTC from his Brain wallet.

So think wisely before, because not everyone is Stephen Hawkings.

Moreover, Making a Brain wallet is very simple and easy and there are two sites to do so.

Where to Create a Brain Wallet


  1. Visit Brainwallet.io and Enter your Paraphrase
  2. Select Random or Select a file like mp3 or txt etc.
  3. Choose a ‘Salt
  4. Now Generate your Keys

creating brain wallet

brain wallet keys


  1. Just Go to Bitaddress and Select Brain Wallet
  2. Enter the Paraphrase and Click on Show
  3. Now Click View and You will get your Private and Public Key

brainwallet bitaddress

Now as I told above you can make Brain wallet not only for Bitcoin but also for other cryptocurrencies.

So inorder to get create a Brain Wallet you can these websites respectively.

Bitcoin – https://brainwallet.io/

Ethereum – https://www.myetherwallet.com/

Litecoin – https://liteaddress.org/

Monero – https://mymonero.com/

Dash – https://paper.dash.org/

Let’s  have a quick look at some of the advantage and disadvantage of using a Brain wallet.

Advantages Disadvantages
Your wallet is extremely safe as no one can hack it. If you forget paraphrase due to any mishap, you will lose your crypto-coins
Paraphrase is not written anywhere, so hack/stealing is impossible Since mnemonic paraphrase is not written, you will lose your funds forever

So, That was it regarding Brain Wallets for today.

I hope you really liked this article and if yes then do share this with your friends.!

Moreover, We would like to know your thoughts over Bran Wallet and comment below if you would use it or not.

Meanwhile, You can read our other amazing guides:


  1. Dipen Sajnani August 28, 2017
    • Rishabh August 29, 2017

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