I classified 551 wallet-recovery questions on Bitcoin Stack Exchange. Only 5 were about losing a seed word.

I went through the wallet-recovery tag on Bitcoin Stack Exchange and classified every question by what actually went wrong. I expected "I lost a word." That is not what is there.

Five questions are a missing or wrong seed word. Thirteen are a forgotten passphrase. Fourteen are derivation path problems, where the seed restores but the wallet comes up empty. Fifty-five are a lost or corrupted device or file.

And 429 are variants of the same thing: I have the backup and I cannot reconstruct the wallet. Old formats, discontinued software, 15 words, 16 words, wallet.aes.json, MultiBit, blockchain.info exports.

For scale, that tag has around 1.58M views. The inheritance-plan tag has 15 questions and around 31K views. People run into losing access while alive far more than they run into what happens after they die, but most of the writing I find is about the second one.

So the dominant failure mode is not that people lack a backup. It is that they have one and it is not enough. The words survived. What died was the context that makes the words mean something: which wallet created them, whether there is a passphrase, what derivation path, whether it was m-of-n, sometimes which software.

Two questions for anyone who has actually done a restore.

First: when you restored, or tried to, what was missing besides the words? I am after the specific thing that stopped you, not general advice.

Second: what do you keep next to your seed backup today? Descriptor, xpub, derivation path, a note about the wallet, nothing? And has anyone ever verified it is enough, rather than assuming?

I am mostly interested in the second one. My suspicion is that a lot of us write down 12 words, feel finished, and have never once checked whether those 12 words alone would get us back in. I would like to know if that suspicion is wrong.