Author: Thomas Voegtlin 2016-08-24 12:51:32
Published on: 2016-08-24T12:51:32+00:00
Luke Dashjr, a Bitcoin Core developer, has expressed his belief that BIP39 and BIP44 are poorly designed. The two proposals are used by numerous cryptocurrency wallets and hundreds of thousands of users. However, there is limited support for them in Electrum, with the aim of maintaining compatibility with hardware wallets. Dashjr has stated that he will not use BIP39/BIP44 for default Electrum wallets for several reasons. Firstly, BIP44 uses multiple accounts, which means that any wallet that does not implement multiple accounts will be considered broken. Secondly, hardened derivations can break the property of being able to use the same instance of a wallet on different devices. Thirdly, the complexity of having multiple accounts is unnecessary since using different derivation passphrases with the same BIP39 seed phrase achieves the same result. Fourthly, BIP39 is inconsistent because it uses a hash of the utf8 encoded 'seed phrase' but requires the implementation of a checksum. Finally, BIP39 seed phrases do not have a version number, which creates problems when wallets start using new derivation methods.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T19:50:32.742136+00:00