Author: Sjors Provoost 2018-01-05 16:04:10
Published on: 2018-01-05T16:04:10+00:00
The current BIP-39 standard may lead to vendor lock-in and long-term loss of funds due to very few wallets that support anything other than English. Supporting multiple languages would be useful as people can memorize things better in their native tongue. An alternative standard would be where words are mapped to integers rather than a literal string, and for each language, a mapping from words to integers would be published. In addition, there would be a mapping from original language words to matching English words that people can print on an A4 paper. This will allow them to enter a mnemonic into hardware wallets that only support English. A new feature could replace the current BIP-39 (duress) password by appending words (with or without a checksum for that addition). The replacement for BIP-39 provides an opportunity to produce a better English dictionary that includes unique 4-character prefixes, all words with 4-8 characters, and no two words with edit distance Op 5 jan. 2018, om 14:58. Nic Johnson suggested producing this dictionary a while ago. There is currently a proposal to enhance the BIP 39 wordlist set by specifying canonical native language strings to identify each wordlist, as well as short ASCII language codes. Currently, the languages are identified only by their names in English. Strings properly vetted and recommended by native speakers should facilitate language identification in user interface options or menus. The specification of language identifier strings would also promote interface consistency between implementations. The suggestion is that the specification of appropriate strings in bitcoin:bips/bip-0039/bip-0039-wordlists.md be made part of the process for accepting new wordlists.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T23:26:08.798554+00:00