bitcoin-dev

BIP- & SLIP-0039 -- better multi-language support

BIP- & SLIP-0039 -- better multi-language support

Original Postby Weiji Guo

Posted on: November 22, 2018 17:25 UTC

In a bitcoin-dev post, Steven Hatzakis suggested revising the process for generating BIP39 seed, proposing that the initial entropy be fed into the PBKDF2 function instead of the words.

In response to this suggestion, Weiji proposed incorporating Shamir's Secret Sharing into the design to maintain language independence and enable mnemonic in multiple languages simultaneously. The proposed revision provides for a language id for each defined wordlist in the SSS share, as well as share id, threshold, index, share value, and checksum. Weiji suggests using two languages or one language + numbers to check each other in case of an error in handprinting, which is prone to human error at a rate of about 0.9% per word. This will make it easier to figure out which word was handprinted incorrectly.