 Moho asks, I tried to recover a wallet with my Bip39 mnemonic seed, but the balance of the wallet is showing zero. I'm quite annoyed, obviously. The backup was done carefully. When I look up the receive address on a block explorer, the coins haven't moved. Is there a way I could verify that my receive address is linked to my mnemonic seed? Is it possible that my wallets, I've tried both samurai and mycelium, take multiple days to update to the right balance? Lots of questions packed in there. This is a common problem, and you've got to be careful when you're using seeds. It's often very useful to make a note of which wallet you use to initially create the seed and use the seed. There are two aspects to, or rather even three aspects, to recovering a seed. First is the seed itself. Obviously, you need to have your 12 or 24 words, and you need to have them in the correct order. They have a checksum, so you can know whether that's a correct mnemonic seed, because your wallet won't accept it if it's not in the correct order or the checksum doesn't match. You've gotten this far, obviously. You've been able to import the mnemonic seed into a wallet, so the seed is okay. Now, how does the wallet take that seed and generate receive addresses? Well, it uses two additional pieces of information. One is a potential passphrase, and you'll see from the comments of other people responding that that may be an issue. If you used a passphrase in addition to the mnemonic seed, which is a very common security mechanism, people do this in order to have a second factor when they're worried about the physical security of the seed itself, of the mnemonic, and they're not sure if they can keep the mnemonic secure. Your living situation, you might have roommates, you might have other people living with you that you don't trust, you might not have a physically secure location or a bank safe deposit box somewhere to store your seed with physical security. So, maybe then you need a second factor. So, if you have set a passphrase, then in order to restore your mnemonic, you also need to reapply that same passphrase. So, every passphrase you use will generate a different set of receive addresses from the same mnemonic seed. So, mnemonic seed plus passphrase A generates one address, mnemonic seed plus passphrase B, different passphrase generates another set of addresses, mnemonic seed without passphrase generates a third set of addresses. So, if you're not seeing the addresses generated that you expect to see, because there's no balance in them, for example, if you enter all of the information and you see no balance, then you may be entering the passphrase wrong. Now, keep in mind with BIP39 mnemonics, there's no such thing as a wrong passphrase. Every passphrase generates some address. The passphrase simply will generate an address that you've never used because you mistyped it or typed it differently from when you had before, and you're going to end up at a zero balance address. Of course, if you just take random passphrases or any random place, you're going to end up in a random address and it's not being used and it's going to have a zero zero balance. So, if you're seeing zero balance, one possibility is you're mistyping your passphrase or you use the passphrase before and you're not using one now, which is the same as mistyping your passphrase. Finally, the third aspect of this is that a mnemonic seed is converted into addresses using what's known as a derivation path. The derivation path looks like a string of numbers. For example, you might see something like m44 prime slash zero prime slash zero prime slash zero. That's a derivation path. What that's telling the wallet is that in order to arrive at a specific address, you need to take from the master, from the master private key that is generated from the seed, and you need to derive the 44th hardened sub-address and from that the 0th or first hardened sub-address of that and then the zero hardened sub-address of that. Now, you don't need to worry about the details. The point is that if you use a different derivation path from the one you used in the beginning, you're going to end up at a different set of addresses that haven't been used and therefore will have a zero balance. How do you know which derivation path is used by your wallet? Well, there are standards and 44 prime, for example, is a specific standard defined under BIP 44, which is a multi-currency, multi-account personal wallet. That's a specific purpose and derivation path that is common and standard across many, many wallets, the most likely one in fact. But if you're deriving, for example, Segwit addresses, whether those are Segwit wrapped in P2SH, an address that starts with three, that's going to be derived from a different path than the traditional Bitcoin addresses that start with a one. If you're deriving a pure native Segwit address, that's going to be derived from a different path from the traditional addresses that start with one or the P2SH wrapped addresses that start with three. For example, a native Segwit address which starts with BC1 is going to have a different derivation path. The bottom line is, if you're arriving at addresses that have no balance, the most likely thing here is that you're using a different derivation path than the one you used when you originally created the wallet and the one you used when you originally moved money into these addresses. You're looking at different addresses. How do you find the receive addresses? You try several different standard paths until you find them or you try to remember which wallet you used and see what derivation path it used. Of course, the money hasn't gone anywhere. It's still there. If your seed was transcribed accurately and you remember your passphrase, you're not going to lose anything. It's still there. You just have to figure out exactly where on this long and complicated derivation path it might be. Good luck with that. The one thing I will say is that you asked, is it possible that the wallets take multiple days to update to the right balance? With the wallets you described, which are Samurai and Mycelium, no. It doesn't take that long because they're not syncing a full chain in order to do that. They're using third-party servers in order to look up the balance of addresses and UTXO sets. It doesn't take that long. It may take 10 minutes to re-scan the wallet, but it should not take days. You should also see that within the settings there's an option to re-scan a wallet. Let's go back to the chat room and see how things are going. Hardware wallet security. Guy asks, is there a security risk to monitoring the balance of a hardware wallet with a watch-only wallet using the master public key? Similarly, is there a security benefit to splitting funds between a checking hardware wallet for more regular use and a savings hardware wallet that's rarely connected to a computer? Good questions here, Guy. There's no security risk per se to having a watch-only wallet using the master public key. In fact, you wouldn't be using the master public key. What you would be using is a hardened derivation expub, which means that you would be using an expub that derives from a specific account, perhaps m44'0'0'0', which is the first receive address of the first account of the first currency in a multi-currency, multi-account derivation path. So, because it's a hardened public key that's derived three levels down, and that's usually what your hardware wallet would export. If you ask it to export an expub, that's what it's giving you. It's not giving you the root expub. It's not insecure to use that on another computer, for example. However, there is a privacy risk. The privacy risk is, of course, that anybody who has access to a computer that's watching these funds now knows, or someone who gains access to that computer, may now know how much money you have on that seed. They may change their opinion as to how much risk they're willing to take to compromise your security in order to steal those funds. So, if they thought you had $100, and they look at your expub that's published and see that you have $100 million, now they're going to take a different set of risks to compromise that seed. So, there is a privacy risk to that. However, you can decide how you want to do that. There is no technical security risk with simply exporting a master public key, which is appropriately hardened. Is there a security benefit to splitting funds between multiple hardware wallets or multiple seeds? To a certain degree there is, and you've got to strike this really, really careful balance. For example, I do believe that there is good reason to have one seed that you use for cold storage that is not even installed on a hardware wallet, that you have only as a paper or other fixed medium backup, stamped in steel or etched or something like that, with multiple copies that you do not install on a hardware wallet unless you absolutely need to. So, that's a slightly higher level of security. And, of course, you might have a passphrase to protect that too. And that's your really, really cold storage. And then you also have a device that you use for everyday operations. For example, if you're running a business with crypto and you need to have an operating budget in order to be able to pay salaries or receive payments, etc., etc., and you're pulling this hardware wallet out every single day to get another receive address for an invoice and pay a contractor and do things like that, then that would be more of a checking hardware wallet if you like, or a spending hardware wallet. And I do that, and I certainly believe there is good reason to do that. Now, how far do you take that, right? If one is good and two is better, is three best, is four best, how about a hundred? And then you get into other problems. Because for every new seed you create, you need to have a very robust backup plan. You need to figure out where you're going to store this. You're going to need to audit and keep track of where the backup copies are. You're going to need to do some inheritance planning or some continuity planning for your business, etc., etc. The more you have, the more complex that gets. And there's no significant advantage to having more than two. Two is a good number, because then you have the one that's warmish and the one that's very cold. But creating other levels within there doesn't really make much sense. And there really is rarely need to take an amount that's, say, too large and split it across multiple seeds.