Author: Keagan McClelland 2023-05-19 21:24:45
Published on: 2023-05-19T21:24:45+00:00
A developer named Yuri has proposed a password format that improves upon BIP39 by allowing meaningful, themed sentences with a regular grammatical structure instead of semantically disconnected words, while keeping the same entropy/checksum and total bits/non-repeating leading digits ratios (of 32/1 and 11/4 respectively). The idea is to make it easier for users to memorize their seed phrases. The proposal is available on GitHub, but there seems to be a lack of a BIP style specification for this. It is suggested that the process should "extend" BIP39 rather than "replace" it since BIP39 is heavily entrenched in the ecosystem. The main value proposition of these schemes is that it allows significant wallet interoperability. However, themes may make it harder to solve the deterministic translation of phrases to the underlying wallet seed. Overall, exploring this idea further is a good idea, but there may be concerns about whether the increased memorability is a good thing. It would certainly make $5 wrench attacks more viable, not less. There is a possibility that a wide deployment of this type of tech could change the ratio of loss versus theft.
Updated on: 2023-06-16T18:13:20.410040+00:00