Author: Dan Libby 2017-09-06 07:19:31
Published on: 2017-09-06T07:19:31+00:00
A discussion took place on the bitcoin-dev mailing list regarding what would happen if you recover a wallet using seed words. The discussion highlighted that since there is no difference in seed words between segwit/non-segwit, the wallet would discover both m/44' and m/49' accounts. However, this would require constant monitoring of both accounts for transactions which was deemed an ugly solution. The discussion also raised concerns about XPUB Derivation and how it was not addressed in the BIP yet. With m/49', there is no way to know whether an xpub is from m/44' or m/49', which breaks a lot of things. Wallets like electrum/armory/mycelium support importing xpub as a watch-only wallet, and services like blockonomics/blockchain.info use xpub for displaying balance/generating merchant addresses. This was agreed by the author of tools hd-wallet-addrs and hd-wallet-derive, who suggested it would be great if xpub/xprv could somehow encode their absolute path in the wallet for tools to read as users cannot be expected to know.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T15:17:59.913580+00:00