Author: Sjors Provoost 2018-01-05 17:13:23
Published on: 2018-01-05T17:13:23+00:00
The current BIP-39 standard is being discussed in the bitcoin-dev mailing list, specifically in regards to language specific word lists. Sjors Provoost, a contributor to bitcoin-dev, thinks that although supporting multiple languages is useful, he does not agree with the idea of adding language specific word lists to the current standard due to vendor lock-in and long term loss of funds if a rare non-English wallet disappears. Instead, he suggests a new standard where words are mapped to integers, with a mapping from original language words to matching English words. This would allow users to enter a mnemonic into an English-only hardware wallet. Additionally, Sjors proposes a better English dictionary for this new standard. The proposal could be implemented by sorting the new word list such that reused words appear first, which would distinguish between old and new standards. Meanwhile, nullius suggests the inclusion of canonical native language strings to identify each wordlist set in the specification of bitcoin:bips/bip-0039/bip-0039-wordlists.md. However, it remains that very few wallets currently support anything other than English, so using anything other than 12, 16 or 24 English words will leave users with fewer wallets to choose from.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T23:28:10.399606+00:00