Author: Pieter Wuille 2014-04-08 13:53:52
Published on: 2014-04-08T13:53:52+00:00
The discussion revolves around the use of BIP32 trees across different currency types. The disagreement stems from whether to share a single BIP32 tree or use independent chains for different currencies. An alternative suggestion is given which involves using one seed across different chains, but with separate master nodes. To derive the master node from the seed, the key string "Bitcoin seed" is replaced by something chain-specific and every encoded node has a chain-specific serialization magic. This method is similar to the original suggestion except that the m/cointype' in m/cointype'/account'/change/n is replaced by different masters. One disadvantage of this method is that there is no way to encode the "super master" that is the parent of all chain-specific masters. In response to the initial suggestion, slush argues that it is dangerous to expect that other seeds than "xprv" do not contain bitcoins or that "xprv" contains only bitcoins. Therefore, it is safer to do the lookup as the magic itself is ambiguous. Slush suggests that serialization magic of bip32 seed is unnecessary and most software does not care about it anyway. Instead, he recommends separating the chains inside the bip32 path.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T18:19:21.935180+00:00