Author: Andreas Schildbach 2016-08-24 13:47:08
Published on: 2016-08-24T13:47:08+00:00
During a discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Luke Dashjr shared his views on BIP39 and BIP44. He mentioned that BIP 39 is a mnemonic code used to generate deterministic keys, which is used by many wallets and hundreds of thousands of users. BIP 44 is Multi-Account Hierarchy for Deterministic Wallets, which appears to be implemented by several wallets. However, Thomas Voegtlin expressed that he believed that BIP39/BIP44 was a bad design and provided reasons as to why. One of the reasons is that there is limited support for these BIPs in Electrum, which is used to provide compatibility with hardware wallets. However, he did not plan to use BIP39/BIP44 for default Electrum wallets. He stated that BIP44 uses multiple accounts, so any wallet that decides to implement one without the other would be considered broken. An appealing feature of deterministic wallets is that you can use the same instance of your wallet on different devices, but hardened derivations break this property.He also mentioned that from an end-user perspective, the multiple accounts in BIP44 achieve the same result as using different derivation passphrases with the same BIP39 seed phrase. The fact that the wordlist must be part of BIP39 and cannot be changed in the future seems like a terrible idea to him. Additionally, BIP39 seed phrases do not have a version number, which is problematic when wallets start using new derivation methods such as SegWit or Schnorr signatures.Voegtlin believes that BIP43 should be made final as well if it isn't already. BIP44 could still be final since some wallets interoperate on that standard, but he insisted on separating BIP43 from BIP44 so that someone else could come up with a better "BIP44+" standard and not get in the way of existing standards.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T19:50:11.289809+00:00