Author: Neill Miller 2015-03-12 03:59:45
Published on: 2015-03-12T03:59:45+00:00
In an email exchange between two Bitcoin developers, Thy Shizzle expresses disappointment that Electrum 2.0 doesn't use BIP39, to which Neill responds that while a static wordlist is required once people have started using BIP39 for anything real and changing the word lists will invalidate any existing mnemonics. While versioning would be nice, complete wallet interoperability is a bit of a myth, according to Neill. Thomas V, another developer, believes that BIP39 reproduces two mistakes made when designing the older Electrum seed system. The first problem he has with BIP39 is that the seed phrase does not include a version number, which means it's unwise to make decisions that prevent future innovation. Electrum v2 seed phrases include an explicit version number, that indicates how the wallet addresses should be derived, while BIP39 seed phrases do not include a version number at all. The second problem he sees with BIP39 is that it requires a fixed wordlist. To support the old Electrum v1 seeds, all future versions of Electrum will have to include the old wordlist. In addition, when generating new seed phrases, Electrum now has to avoid collisions with old seed phrases, because the old ones did not have a version number. Electrum v2 derives both its private keys and its checksum/version number using a hash of the seed phrase, which means that wordlists can be added and modified in the future, without breaking existing seed phrases.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T18:10:43.306704+00:00