A Sly Roundabout Way

If you haven’t met any real life bitcoiners I’d recommend it and wish I’d done it sooner. I’m lucky to be near enough to Cyphermunk House in London to go to their regular meetups. Last week I met Wingman and Shamsi who were visiting. Wingman is the cypherpunk behind seedsafe.io who designed the fascinating Qosqo, a stainless-steel analog guardian for your 12-word seed phrase. Its three-plate astrological design has the twelve zodiac symbols etched into a twistable precision mechanism. You stamp a series of dots reminiscent of a star map design, using BIP-39, encoding your seed words. It’s security by obscurity combined with physical toughness; the Qosqo withstands up to 850°C.

Shamsi Moseli is an Iranian artist who created a beautiful set of cosmic paintings reflecting the signs of the zodiac. Within her vibrant set of twelve mandala ‘meditative portals’, she has incorporated seedsafe’s Qosqo design.

Shamsi’s exhibition in Indonesia was called Hidden in Plain Sight at Bali. The Qosqo – the word comes from the Incas who considered Qosqo the centre of the world and where cosmic order was maintained - is something indestructible and hidden in plain sight; you can swan through the airport wearing the Qosqo as a necklace or on a keychain and nobody will know what is hidden within those stainless-steel plates!

Other metal stamping set-ups put me off because I kept thinking if anyone finds it they can immediately see your seed words and if they know about bitcoin they will understand that they can access it instantly by typing those words into any software wallet. The Qosqo puts a few more steps in between that for someone who might know what it is and be able to decode it. But for most people it looks like a piece of nicely designed machinery and not something that could be a key to your savings! Of course, mainly, the point is, we are our own worst enemy so it’s a foolproof way to stamp and store your seed words in a way you can retrieve them accurately.