Published on: 2022-01-18T16:33:04+00:00
The Bitcoin-dev mailing list recently discussed the potential confusion caused by similar-sounding words in the BIP39 wordlist used for seed recovery cards. Erik Aronesty brought up the issue of adjacent ambiguity, citing examples like "art", "work", and "artwork" being three different words. Duplicates were also mentioned, such as "canal" and "arm" versus "can" and "alarm". Jeremy Rubin suggested adding non-void whitespace characters to address this problem, while acknowledging the difficulty of changing the BIP39 standard list that software expects. The idea of rejecting seeds with similar-sounding word pairs was also considered, but the extent of entropy loss remained uncertain.The discussion further delved into Trezor recovery cards, which feature each word in a separate box and require users to write them one under the other instead of side by side. Pavol Rusnak, co-founder of SatoshiLabs, provided an example of a Trezor recovery card and proposed removing words that are strict subsets of others, like "add" being a subset of "addict" and "address". It was noted that even with a 1000-word list and a 12-word seed, the chances of randomly generating a duplicate seed would be exceedingly rare, far surpassing the age of the universe, even if every person on Earth generated 1000 seeds per second. Therefore, the concern over entropy loss was deemed insignificant.In summary, the bitcoin-dev mailing list discussed the potential confusion caused by similar-sounding words in seed recovery cards. Various solutions were proposed, including the use of non-void whitespace characters and the rejection of seeds with similar-sounding word pairs. However, changing the BIP39 standard list proved challenging due to software expectations. The discussion also touched on Trezor recovery cards and the importance of clear communication to avoid confusion.
Updated on: 2023-08-02T05:23:58.009016+00:00