Author: James MacWhyte 2018-12-25 00:30:26
Published on: 2018-12-25T00:30:26+00:00
The discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list revolved around the use of 12-word recovery phrases for wallets and their effectiveness compared to 32-byte BIP32 hexadecimal seeds. Aymeric Vitte questioned why it's easier to remember a set of words one cannot choose rather than a hex seed, as many people tend to forget their phrase or lose their wallets because of this. James MacWhyte argued that a recovery phrase has qualities that make it more resilient for physical (written) storage. A few letters of a word can be rubbed off, but a native speaker can still figure out what the word is supposed to be. Missing characters in a hex string require more advanced brute force searching. Additionally, if you lose one entire word, it can be brute forced in about 5 minutes on a normal PC using a tool that James published called "recovery-phrase-recovery." Missing two words can be brute-forced in about a week. From a UX standpoint, users may not take a 12-word phrase seriously enough, so a hex string would most likely be better protected by users as it looks more password-like.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T16:32:27.891531+00:00