Seed Oracle — a guided journey from I Ching hexagrams to a BIP39 seed phrase
A Bitcoin seed phrase and an I Ching cast are the same act: meaning drawn from honest chance. Twelve seed words are 132 bits of information. A hexagram is six lines, and a line holds one bit — solid yang is 1, broken yin is 0. Six into 132 goes exactly twenty-two times: a seed is a stack of twenty-two hexagrams. This page walks that identity from your first thrown line to the finished phrase — and at the end, the last free lines are not thrown at all. They are yours to choose.
Every oracle starts with a coin. In the machine's tongue, a coin toss is one bit — the smallest possible fact, a 1 or a 0. In the oracle's tongue it is one cast line — solid yang or broken yin. The same event, written in two scripts. Six throws build a hexagram, from the bottom line up; which means every hexagram is six bits. Throw your first line.
One hexagram down. A seed needs to be unguessable — in the machine's tongue, 128 bits of entropy: 2128 possibilities, more than there are grains of sand if every grain were itself a computer guessing since the beginning of time. In the oracle's tongue: the cast must be undirected — a fair coin, an open hand; a steered reading reads only you. This page draws its chance from the browser's cryptographic well (crypto.getRandomValues) and refuses to cast at all if that well is missing.
Cast on — to twenty-one. Tap any thrown hexagram to re-throw just it. The twenty-second slot stands apart: it will not throw, and the next chapters are the reason why.
Words are numbers wearing clothes. The BIP39 word list holds exactly 2048 words — 211 — so every seed word is an eleven-bit number in costume: 00000000000 is abandon, 11111111111 is zoo. Your cast lays bits down six at a time; the words take them up eleven at a time. Six against eleven never phases the same way twice — that offset is the weave, and the ribbon below is your actual cast: each band of shading one hexagram's six lines, each group of eleven one word.
Eleven words stand complete. The twelfth is starving — six cells short. The missing cells belong to the hexagram that would not throw.
A seed must prove itself. In the machine's tongue: the final four bits of a twelve-word seed are not chosen — they are the checksum, the first four bits of SHA-256 over the 128 entropy bits. A fingerprint of everything you cast, folded into the phrase itself, so that a mistyped or misremembered seed betrays itself: change anything, anywhere, and fifteen times out of sixteen the ending no longer matches. In the oracle's tongue: the reading must cohere — the oracle countersigns what chance has written, and a forged or fumbled line will not take the seal.
The twenty-second hexagram: its top four lines are the seal — the mathematics' hand. Its bottom two are the last free lines. They are covered next.
Your reading is sealed. Enter the test, tap any cell in the ribbon above, and watch the whole seal refuse a single flipped line. Tap the cell again — or leave the test — to restore the true cast. Nothing you do here touches your committed reading.
The same seal, in the word tongue
A 12-word seed is not twelve free words — the last word folds the checksum in. Bring the first 11 (your own cast's, or any from the word list) and the oracle reveals every final word that coheres — sixteen endings exist, exactly one for each pattern the seal can demand. Pick one and it completes the phrase.
Two free lines remain — and two lines can fall four ways. Four is a number this site knows well: the four suits, the four elements of the old tarot correspondence. Read bottom-first: yin·yin is Hearts, yin·yang Clubs, yang·yin Diamonds, yang·yang Spades.
So the last free act of this seed is not a throw. It is a choice. Chance cast the reading; your hand signs it; the mathematics seals it. Each suit completes your same twenty-one hexagrams into a different valid reading — the oracle computes the four seal lines each choice demands. Choose your suit.
A longer reading exists — twenty-four words, forty-four hexagrams — but its eight seal bits claim the final hexagram whole: no free lines, no choice, no suit. The twelve-word reading is the one that leaves room for your hand.
Nothing on this page needs believing. Below are the bits beneath your words — the raw entropy and its checksum — and the instrument to check the seal with your own hands.
Seal a reading above to see its entropy.
Geomancy's own alphabet — four lines to a figure, a figure to each hex digit, so the entropy above can be written as thirty-two figures. Tap one to hear it speak.
Verify the seal yourself: hash your entropy, and the first four bits of the digest must be your four seal lines. The same tool, with more company, lives on the Calculator.
And the road runs both ways: paste any phrase into the box in chapter V and the page reads it straight back into hexagrams — words to lines to words, losslessly.
The seed these words make
For the curious: the 512-bit BIP39 seed (PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512, empty passphrase) that these words expand into — the number a real wallet would grow its whole tree of keys from. Shown to make the idea concrete, not to be used.
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Addresses
Expand to derive the first address from this seed.
Built on Ian Coleman's BIP39 (MIT, © 2014–2016 Ian Coleman). Hexagram readings are a direct English translation of the original Zhōu Yì judgments.