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Phrase · Copied and pasted
I copied my phrase from a password manager and it doesn’t work
You saved the phrase in a password manager or a note, you copy it, you paste it, and the wallet rejects it. Before panicking: in the vast majority of these cases the phrase is fine and what fails is how it was copied.
What breaks a phrase when copying
- Extra or missing spaces. Two spaces between words, a trailing space, a leading one. The wallet counts them.
- Line breaks. If you stored it in columns, pasting can bring returns the app doesn’t read as separators.
- Capital letters. Some apps require lowercase, and phone autocapitalisation capitalises the first word without you noticing.
- Autocorrect. The phone keyboard «fixes» list words it thinks are typos. It is the silent cause par excellence.
- Hyphens or commas you added as separators that now travel stuck to the words.
What to do, in order
- Type the phrase by hand, word by word, instead of pasting it. That solves most cases.
- Write it all in lowercase with a single space between words.
- If you are on a phone, turn off autocorrect before typing it.
- If the app has separate boxes for each word, use them: they avoid every spacing problem.
Type it only inside the wallet app, never in a notes app, a search box, a translator or a website «to check it». Taking it out of the manager to debug it somewhere else is exactly how safe wallets get lost.
If it still won’t go in
Then there is something to find out, and the likely explanations are few: it is a phrase in another language, it belongs to a different system such as Electrum’s, or one word was swapped for another that also exists. All three are covered in my phrase has a word that isn’t on the list and in I misspelled a word.
And one thought that will spare you the next scare: if your phrase lives in a password manager, it lives in a service that can go down, shut or change hands, protected by a password you can also forget. Always keep a paper copy as well.