You can play with https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ to see what happens.
In short: without a passphrase, the 12/24 words are entropy and get hashed into your private key. With a passphrase, this is added to the entropy, creating a completely separate wallet.
The difference between the two is that the bip39 encoding (the 12/24 words) have a checksum built in, so if you make a mistake, it most likely will catch that. You can try this by changing one of the seed words if you generate a random seed.
The passphrase does not have a checksum, so any typo will create a completely new wallet.
Not the best explanation, but mainly a shill for Ian's great tool.
mutatrum
npub1hk…23u2k
2024-06-07 11:44:21
in reply to nevent1q…zfhe
Author Public Key
npub1hklphk7fkfdgmzwclkhshcdqmnvr0wkfdy04j7yjjqa9lhvxuflsa23u2kPublished at
2024-06-07 11:44:21Event JSON
{
"id": "3ca31be9737c18470b2f9efe8037edfaf3bc31d293b01124be22f766427f5baa",
"pubkey": "bdbe1bdbc9b25a8d89d8fdaf0be1a0dcd837bac9691f597892903a5fdd86e27f",
"created_at": 1717760661,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"e",
"131165fcea137f96a6d2c18a113a419a83499ac438262066fb88030d63260633",
"wss://nos.lol",
"root"
],
[
"p",
"64ad753bb77817d5b6e94e2d44ee8acf9e5b8867d90c8e03501e5b4e53098a05"
]
],
"content": "You can play with https://iancoleman.io/bip39/ to see what happens.\n\nIn short: without a passphrase, the 12/24 words are entropy and get hashed into your private key. With a passphrase, this is added to the entropy, creating a completely separate wallet.\n\nThe difference between the two is that the bip39 encoding (the 12/24 words) have a checksum built in, so if you make a mistake, it most likely will catch that. You can try this by changing one of the seed words if you generate a random seed.\n\nThe passphrase does not have a checksum, so any typo will create a completely new wallet.\n\nNot the best explanation, but mainly a shill for Ian's great tool.",
"sig": "e9c8c93ec5bd01c70f108ce16ba615a05f2e7d1e01daf673b6ed18969df7766d2c0d856872108516776ab43c88d4d4e667de12dce0d87fbad6d9c9c786af05d7"
}