A couple of weeks ago I gave a presentation to my local Bitcoin group. This talk was a long time coming and had initially been discouraged as a less than desirable topic. You see, brain wallets are largely frowned upon in the Bitcoin community. They are considered a less than ideal method for storing your seed words. However, with the “and then they fight you” stage heating up, and some subsequent high level political discussions on the topic of making self custody of Bitcoin difficult or even illegal, it felt like it was time to revisit this controversial idea.
First, let’s take a look at why this option of using your own, very capable, brain to memorize 12 words is considered less than ideal. First, there is the freak accident issue. The possibility that you have some sort of accident or incident that renders you physically unable to access your memory. Death, severe brain injury leading to amnesia or any kind of acute trauma, belong in this category. The second argument against a brain wallet generally focuses around the notion of memory degeneration over time or any number of chronic brain diseases that sneak up on those not paying attention to their diet, exercise and other initiatives to ensure strong cognitive function through to the end. Alzheimer’s and Dementia are the main fears here but also general brain fogginess can nurture this concern.
The third and most persuasive argument is the compelling fallacy that our memories are not very effective, not withstanding any acute or chronic trauma. This widespread, however false, belief leads humans to be distrusting of themselves. This is the myth I most eagerly sort to dispel with my Memory Palace presentation. I see this as simply another step along the evolution Bitcoin is taking to return self-efficacy and personal responsibility to the human race.
You see, as a society, through many generations, we have been led, nay, educated to believe that we cannot trust ourselves. We cannot trust our bodies to heal themselves, we must outsource this specialized knowledge to medical specialists. We cannot trust ourselves to think, we must outsource our thinking to ‘the science’, the specialists, to our government, to our media outlets, even to very effective advertising companies, all whom are kept very busy telling us what to think. We cannot trust ourselves with custodying our money, we must outsource this specialty service to banks. Apparently, we also cannot even trust ourselves to walk safely. Hence, when crossing a road we need lines painted on the road, and a flashing and beeping sign that lets us know when it is safe to do so. Or when walking near cliff edges, we need barriers and designated walking paths to protect us from ourselves. I have to say, with all our incompetence, how on earth did homo sapiens make it this far?
And so with a little trepidation, the brain wallet critics eagerly anticipating any opportunity, I began my presentation on the Memory Palace. I sought to help my audience understand the rightful place of the ‘brain wallet’ in our arsenal of seed phrase storage and recovery. *For clarity’s sake the words, seed and key, with regards to Bitcoin wallets have been used interchangeably throughout this article.
I am personally deeply invested in this topic as, from the moment I became enchanted with Bitcoin, I have been on the hunt to find an effective and practical toolkit of methods for using Bitcoin to store, geographically relocate and later, pass down, multigenerational wealth to my descendants. Until very recently, I hadn’t come across any solution I believed was suitable. However, now with the BIP-85 Master Key solution that my fellow Bitcoiner, and Director of Mineracks has brought to my attention, I’m feeling excited that my search may have found an agreeable destination.
In a perfect world, and pre the BIP-85 solution, I would have hoped never to need a brain wallet. However, we are living through a period in history where the global reserve currency is being rapidly inflated into obscurity, leading to global economic instability. Economic instability makes everyone very nervous and has historically led to times of both domestic and international instability.
“First currency wars, then trade wars, then real wars.” Jeff Booth, The Price of Tomorrow.
As such, it is not difficult to imagine a dystopian situation where we may wish to cross borders or ‘check points’ with our wealth safely stored in our memories. Or, we may simply not want to have important information laying around our homes that can be found. Thankfully, gone are the days of sewing gold coins into the hems of our jackets and hoping to slip through undetected.
My presentation started with a quick memory test, I invited my audience to call out 12 random words, which I recorded on a notepad. I then threw back some questions to see if anyone could remember all 12 words and in the correct sequence. As expected no audience member was able to achieve this ‘memory’ feat. Thoroughly discouraged, and more convinced then ever that their memories were not up to the task, I asked my audience to participate in a second, seemingly more difficult, memory task. This time I was going to show my audience 21 images for approximately one second per image and we were going to see if anyone could remember all 21 images. The group consensus was not positive. In the following 21 seconds, I proceeded to flash up all 21 images. Once again I asked if anyone felt they would be able to remember the 21 images they had just seen. Again, there was a lack of confidence that anyone would be able to retain the information they had just been shown and also a few complaints about the speed with which I flicked through the images. Now it was time to test everyone’s memory for the second time. This time I put up 2 images on the screen and asked my audience to choose which image they had seen a few moments earlier.
Here’s an example of the dual images the audience were asked to choose between:
With these two images, the audience were not choosing between two clearly different objects. In most cases, they were choosing between extremely similar images. To everyone’s amazement, almost the entire audience was able to remember all 21 of the images they had seen originally displayed. This was the case irrespective of the tiny amount of time they had seen the first image. The same can be said for the arrangement of the alternative images and also largely irrespective of how similar the second image was to the original. In this part of my presentation I was repeating a tried and tested memory experiment. The audience was astonished at their ability to remember the correct image in each example, the critics were silent. My aim, in this section of my presentation, was to demonstrate that it was not our memory but, rather, our recall that creates our biggest obstacle in recalling desired information at will.
This is where the memory palace comes in. Memory palaces are a technique used by the world’s leading memory champions. These people compete in championships that test their memories across incredibly difficult memory challenges. An example of the memory feats that are tested during championships include being challenged to remember every card in 4 decks of cards. The champions are expected to not only be able to recite each card back in order but also to be able to relay which exact card was card number 157.
Memory palaces are a memory recall mind hack. They allow us to store a catalogue of information in a manner which makes it easy for us to locate and recall that information.
So what is a memory palace? A memory palace is a body, place, area, or environment familiar to the user. A great example of a memory palace is the human body. We all have one. To create our own memory palace using our body we would first draw our body and number and name each location (or peg) that we want to use to store the information we wish to remember.
An example of a simple memory palace:
We would then take our list of information, for this example we will use a shopping list but we could just as easily remember a list of historical dates and facts for our history test or our seed words to our brain wallet. We would then use our vivid and elaborate imaginations to attach each item from our list to each location in our memory palace. I like to create Dr Seuss like images. The weirdest, wackiest, grossest, most unusual image, we can bring to mind relating the item from our list to our peg, the better. For example, if I want to remember milk from my shopping list and my first location on my ‘body’ memory palace is my toes, I might see all ten of my toes disconnected and individually having a swimming race in a giant Olympic sized swimming pool filled with milk. Or I might see ten starving little toes, latching onto teats on the side of a milk bottle and guzzling the entire bottle of milk. My second item on my list is bananas and my second location is my foot. So, I might imagine my foot wearing an elaborate high heel made of banana skins and me slipping and sliding all over the place as I try to walk in slippery banana peel shoes. And so it goes until we have all items on our shopping list attached to our memory pegs within our memory palace. Later that day when we arrive at the market, all we need to do is ‘search’ our body for each of the items on our list.
Remembering each memory palace is unique to the individual creating it, other examples of potential memory palaces might include your home, your neighbourhood, your kitchen. It can be any location you are intimately familiar with. It’s important to note, the key to creating an effective memory palace is to map your palace with pen and paper making sure to number and name each specific peg/location within your palace. It is totally manageable to have multiple palaces in use simultaneously. The world memory champions will often have a dozen or more palaces in use at any one time. However, for the purpose of securing your Master Seed, one small, simple memory palace will suffice.
With your well-constructed memory palace locked in place and practiced on non-critical lists, it is now time to lock into memory, your Master Seed, the one seed to rule all seeds.
Happy stacking!
TATWD