Bitcoin HD Seed

This script assists with dumping the HD wallet seed for a Bitcoin Core HD wallet. HD wallets were introduced to Core starting with Bitcoin Core 0.13.0, released August 23, 2016. This tool works by calling the dumpwallet JSON-RPC method, and extracting the master seed from its output. For more information about HD wallets, see BIP32.

In principle, the master seed is the only thing you need to back up if you are using an HD wallet; all subsequent keys used by the wallet are generated deterministically from the HD seed. You can use a tool like bip32utils to experiment with these derived keys.

Installation

From the git checkout:

# Optional: create and activate a virtualenv
mkvirtualenv -p python3 bitcoin-hd-seed
workon bitcoin-hd-seed

# Install dump-hd-seed
pip install -r requirements.txt
python setup.py install

This will install a command called dump-hd-seed.

Usage

Just run dump-hd-seed, and the seed will be dumped to stdout.

If your wallet is locked, you will be prompted for a wallet passphrase. If you don't feel comfortable typing your passphrase this way, manually unlock the wallet (e.g. bitcoin-cli -stdin walletpassphrase) and then enter a blank passphrase at the prompt.