Author: Matt Whitlock 2014-04-04 16:03:37
Published on: 2014-04-04T16:03:37+00:00
In a discussion on the Bitcoin Improvement Proposal (BIP) mailing list, several suggestions were made for updates to BIP-0039. One suggestion was to change the fingerprint field from 16 bits to two bytes, which was agreed upon. Another suggestion was to change the key fingerprint algorithm to something else, and CRC16 was suggested as an alternative. The proposal also discussed the allocation of three different application/version bytes for base58-encoded Shamir shares. While it was agreed that this could be minimized in the future to avoid collisions, it was noted that users are accustomed to relying on the prefix of the base58 encoding to understand what the object is. The discussion also covered using the same P256 prime as for the elliptic curve for consistency's sake, but was ultimately agreed that the present scheme would allow all sizes of secret to use a consistently defined modulus. Additionally, there was a debate over whether to encode j or x[j] in the pairing, with j allowing for the first 256 shares to be encoded, while x[j] was seen as more direct and straightforward to encode. Despite this, the spec is clear on the value of each byte in the encoding, and off-by-one errors were not foreseen.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T17:17:41.777083+00:00