Author: Thomas Voegtlin 2013-10-25 09:27:24
Published on: 2013-10-25T09:27:24+00:00
In a discussion on the Bitcointalk forum, Electrum developer ThomasV admitted he was wrong in rejecting proposals to add extra information to mnemonic seeds. Previously, he had concerns that additional data would make the seed too long and harder to memorize, but this has since been solved by using a slightly longer dictionary. He now sees metadata such as a "version number" as crucially necessary as it specifies which branches of the HD tree should be used for which purpose. BIP32 does not specify which branches of the HD tree should be used for which purpose and so if developers want to recover a wallet from its mnemonic then they need to know which branches to explore. In Electrum 1.9, branch allocation choices were made, however, these are subject to change and thus metadata needs to be added to the mnemonic to reflect this. The solution proposed by ThomasV is similar to Pieter Wuille's proposal and is different from BIP39 in that it doesn't require defining a dictionary. The encoding isn't symmetric, which isn't a requirement for Electrum, but may be required for Trezor. Finally, by mining a utf8 string, metadata can be retrieved from the hash without the need for an agreed-upon dictionary.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T18:23:54.455756+00:00