If you onboard a newbie to nostr, make sure to help them get the nsec into a password manager or similar. Phones will be lost. Apps deleted. They don't know what they do, and with this (imperfect) backup in place they won't have to start from scratch.

Replies (62)

(Speaking from experience obviously; someone reached out to me and I wasn't able to help them recover. All they had was the npub)
Fabian's avatar
Fabian 1 year ago
Yes, good advice but don’t forget to tell them not to do this for their Bitcoin seed phrases ;)
Indeed this is a critical point. There's nothing worse than using your Nostr app for 3 months and then losing your account because your phone breaks and you haven't saved your password anywhere. Do you have any suggestion to improve this aspect on Nstart?
Troy's avatar
Troy 1 year ago
I would encourage the nsec to be stored in multiple places (and different mediums), just like any critical/important data. I have mine written on paper, in a ziplock, in a "fire proof" safe, along with ascii txt files on external drives.
Extremely risky. Use the ncryptsec format. Or also a password protected zip is fine.
The user is already instructed to do so and must confirm the step: image I would not want to block it too much at this point with specific instructions on how/where to save it. Maybe it could be added at the end.
Troy's avatar
Troy 1 year ago
That looks great! If you want to provide more details, I'm thinking an external link for "Best practices for securing a key" would do the trick. I think what you have now is fine without it though.
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Catfish 1 year ago
Would it be too paranoid to save the nsec only in offline devices and use it only with a hardware signer? Just like it is advised to do with Bitcoin. Impersonation could be a potential source of problems, specially if you are a well known person
if not for this feature i would have long gone lost my first nsec. but now i know whats going on so i know how to manage it.
Yes, periodic reminders are a good idea imho. Get reminded or get rekt
Haha, I was being silly and then realized I wasn’t sure if a 12 word standard method existed
I'm talking about noobies that have absolutely no idea what's going on. If they get rekt, they will reach out to the person that onboarded them. Or if they onboard themselves, they might remember that they put it somewhere.
That's good. Mutiny did this well too. They had 3 checkboxes, the last one being "I am NOT just checking this checkbox to get it over with" or something like that πŸ˜…
Tony made a video for Android users View quoted note β†’
Gigi's avatar Gigi
If you onboard a newbie to nostr, make sure to help them get the nsec into a password manager or similar. Phones will be lost. Apps deleted. They don't know what they do, and with this (imperfect) backup in place they won't have to start from scratch.
View quoted note →
Yup already happened to me lol. Got a new phone and never saved my keys so know I have two account one with no access just floating in the nostr ether.
If I lost my phone and there’s some Sats in the Primal Lightening wallet, would I use my nsec private key to recover them? Or another recovery method? Thanks πŸ™
Great advice. I lost my first two NOSTR accounts due to this. I just save my nsec to notesπŸ˜€
Use a local only password manager, such as keepass, and then back it up to a flash drive and other devices in your possession. At least that's how I handle my database. And I've never lost access to it.
πŸ‘†πŸ‘†πŸ‘†πŸ‘†πŸ‘†βœ… Thoughtful β€œworry” saves lives. Misplaced worry drains all energy & eventually kills.
I use keepassxc for my laptop and keepassdx on lineageos. I have been using it that way since 2019 and find that it works well. Since my phone is my primary computing device, that is where the main database lives. And then, about twice a year, I back it up onto two separate flash drives. I also have a copy on my laptop, but that one only gets updated if I specifically need something newer that I don't have already. I will do another backup if I make a very large change to it, such as adding a new crypto wallet or something so that I make sure not to lose that. But otherwise I found that it works quite well.
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