bitcoin-dev
BIP- & SLIP-0039 -- better multi-language support
Posted on: November 8, 2018 10:37 UTC
Weiji Guo, a member of the bitcoin-dev community, highlighted that BIP-0039 is language dependent, which means that the seed generated from a BIP-0039 entropy depends on the language used to create the mnemonic sentence.
This creates issues for users who prefer non-English languages as only a few native languages are supported. While SLIP-0039 does not provide a user-friendly solution to this problem, it offers SSS capability with only an English wordlist. Guo proposed two solutions to address this issue. The first proposal is to represent the mnemonic code as a representation of underlying entropy or pre-master secret, thereby allowing the same seed/secret to be displayed in different languages. The second proposal is to allow the seed/secret to be represented in decimal numbers ranging from 0 to 2047 so that users who have difficulty coping with words in other languages can use numbers instead. It is uncertain how these proposals will be implemented.