I tried an experiment yesterday. The executive summary is that the $20 Trezor Model 1 is a failure as a way to recover a wallet that was created using a Trezor Safe 7.
Here are the details.
Some weeks ago I had created a bitcoin wallet using my spiffy new Trezor Safe 7. Among other things this included jotting down a 20-word seed phrase. This also included stamping the 20-word seed phrase onto two titanium cards, and securing the cards in two places.
The whole purpose of the 20-word seed phrase is that if the spiffy new Trezor Safe 7 were to get run over by a truck, I could simply pull some other (previously unused) hardware wallet out of storage, and click on “recover wallet”, and enter my 20 words. I would then regain access to my wallet.
Fortunately my Trezor Safe 7 has not yet gotten run over by a truck. But I figured I ought to do a rehearsal. Yesterday was the day for the rehearsal, because I had just received a Trezor Model 1 from Amazon. I figured I might as well click on it to “recover” my wallet. But no. When I did this, I was invited to pick a number — 12 or 18 or 24 — as the number of words in my seed phrase. The problem was that my seed phrase was 20 words. And to state the obvious, the number 20 is not the same as the number 12 or 18 or 24.
It turns out that without fully realizing it, when I used my Trezor Safe 7 to create my wallet, I was using a newer standard called SLIP39 and this yielded a 20-word phrase. But the Trezor Model 1 does not support the SLIP39 standard. The Model 1 only supports what is called the BIP39 standard, which is an older standard that defaults to a 12-word seed phrase.
In practical terms, this means that having created my wallet on a Trezor Safe 7, I am not able to restore my wallet using a Trezor Model 1.
It seems that the only Trezor devices that support SLIP39 are the Model T, the Safe 3, the Safe 5, and the Safe 7.
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