Author: 木ノ下じょな 2018-01-08 07:35:52
Published on: 2018-01-08T07:35:52+00:00
The number one problem with BIP39 seeds in Japan is with English words. Many Japanese people have difficulty spelling and copying down English words, leading to mistakes when trying to recover their seed phrases. This issue could be solved by generating Japanese wordlists instead, which would allow for faster and more accurate recovery. However, the current BIP39 standard only supports English wordlists, which is a major issue for non-English speakers. The author argues that a key storage format that doesn't support multiple languages is much more dangerous than any doomsday situation you can think of for supporting them. BIP39 states that seed derivation is independent of wordlists, and that failure to verify checksum (not knowing the wordlist falls under this) should "warn" the user and not fail, continuing to derive the seed anyways. Currently, the only wallet following this part of the BIP is Electrum. The author hopes that multi-language support will be considered for everything moving forward, especially since Bitcoin is an international currency. Defining "everyone should only use English, because ASCII is easier to plan for" is not a good way to move forward. A new standard is being drafted to allow Shamir Secret Scheme Splitting, which will disallow usage of a custom wordlist in order to eradicate the mess caused by non-English wordlists.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T23:27:17.402927+00:00