BIP39 seeds

Summary:

The conversation starts with a drawback in using wallets as people just go to a wallet sw which proposes a new seed, write it somewhere, do something with the wallet and forget about it, go to another one, create another wallet, etc. Apparently, it is not well known that the probabilities are very high to get a valid BIP39 seed even with 24 words, so even with a tool like yours, they can be misled, trying a few words to replace the missing/incorrect one, get a valid seed and stay stuck with it forever, trying to play with BIP44/49 to find their keys. The suggestion proposed is given a secret seed (a book, a document, a link, etc) and a derivation path (an algo with secret parameter(s) to derive/order the words and select the valid bip39 sequences), you get your BIP39 seeds, and you don't have to write them. The discussion moves on to why it's easier to write n words that you cannot choose rather than a 32B BIP32 hex seed. In practice, there are quite a few qualities that make it more resilient for physical (written) storage. If a few letters of a word get rubbed off or otherwise become illegible, it is pretty easy for a native speaker to figure out what the word is supposed to be. Additionally, having the bits grouped into words makes a more serious recovery easier. If you lose one entire word, it can be brute-forced in about 5 minutes on a normal pc, even if you don't know which position the missing word is in. If you were missing a random chunk of a hex string, it's difficult to brute-force that in a timely manner.From a UX standpoint, it has been seen that the 12 words don't look important, so people don't take them seriously (and they get lost). A hex string or equivalent would look more password-y, and therefore would most likely be better protected by users.

Updated on: 2023-06-13T16:32:52.719959+00:00