Author: Gary Rowe 2014-03-12 16:49:09
Published on: 2014-03-12T16:49:09+00:00
The BIP39 word list is integrated into Bitcoinj, which will likely become the de facto standard for Android, Trezor web, and several desktop wallets. Deviating from that word list would result in being in an isolated pocket. MultiBit HD uses a simple timestamp of "number of days since midnight of Bitcoin genesis block in UTC with modulo 97 checksum appended." Thus a new seed generated on January 27th, 2014 would have "1850/01" as its checksum. Modulo 97 was chosen since it catches about 99% of errors. Users are tested when creating a new wallet that they have written the timestamp down with the associated 12/18/24 words. Jean-Paul Kogelman made some comparisons between BIP 39 and his proposal. BIP 39 offers an easy list of words, no gnarly string of case-sensitive letters and numbers. It only offers one fixed length of entropy, always 12 words, with no option to increase or decrease the length. BIP 39 doesn't have a genesis date field, so no optimization during blockchain rescan. BIP 39 does not have password typo detection, and it can't outsource the KDF computation to a 3rd party. BIP 39 wallet implementors can use their own word lists, breaking cross-wallet compatibility. They are encouraged to use the list provided, but having one or two solid options is better than having gazillions of possible options.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T14:44:27.059732+00:00