calle's avatar
calle calle@cashu.me 1 year ago
I did my first real-world economically-not-completely-insignificant ecash wallet recover process from a seed phrase with @Minibits wallet today and trust me – I really wanted this one to work. I first exported all tokens I could access in Minibits and put them into a text file, just in case. I then backed up my mint URL list (I had 6 different mints in this wallet), and then wrote down the derivation path counter for each mint (not strictly necessary but just in case the app doesn't figure it out by itself). Then I made sure that I have my seed phrase stored securely and wiped the wallet app from my phone. I started Minibits again set up a new wallet. I entered the seed phrase, and entered all my mint URLs that I had written down before the restore. Because I'm a power user, my wallet took quite some time to restore and I had to press the button to continue many times (I could give some UX feedback that the dev appreciated and indicated to make this process more seamless and automated in the future). Eventually all my sats popped back in my wallet and I could use the wallet just like before! 🔥 It's felt a bit like magic. I've spent so much of my time on crafting this seed phrase backup process, implementing testing it a thousand times, writing a spec and discussing it with other devs, but I never had to actually use it because of a real accident. Now, seeing it implemented so well by other developers and actually making ecash so more useful and safe to use is pretty amazing. Ecash seed phrase restore is currently live or in dev in these wallets: Live: Nutshell, Minibits – Dev: Nutstash, eNuts, Macadamia. Onward 🥜🫡

Replies (11)

calle's avatar
calle calle@cashu.me 1 year ago
I forgot to mention *why* I needed to restore: I borked the wallet. I shitposted so hard on nostr that I received a dozen zaps while at the same time executing another unrelated payment, or maybe even two. During this chaotic process, one of the tokens got stuck (likely a race condition). Usually the wallet can check and repair its state in these cases but because I had way too many tokens in my OG wallet, the mint API blocked requests during the check. So I took the risk and wiped the wallet to see whether the seed recovery works when actually you need it to work.
Moss's avatar
Moss Moss@BitcoinNostr.com 1 year ago
Great work 🫡 I'm a little confused, sats should be hosted on the operator of the mint URL. Is the mint URL operation stopped? Mnemonic recovery is also unable to restore the sats in my wallet. Whether it ultimately depends on the operator of the mint URL, instead of never having to worry about the operator stopping operations like Bitcoin on the chain.
Minibits's avatar
Minibits dev@minibits.cash 1 year ago
Do you know how many transactions your wallet had before recovery? It starts from index 0, so first rounds are usually filled by already spent ecash that is then filtered out. Unspent follows later based on hoe long history wallet had.
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