Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Is it possible to generate every address from one seed
by
MrFreeDragon
on 18/10/2019, 22:26:32 UTC
It is standard by BIP32 and it is supported by other wallets, not only by Electrum.

Ok, i do not argue. Agree. Actually I like your comment very much as you raised here a good security point.

While you import your secret seed to HD wallet, it uses the standard deriviation path: it scans the first 20 (default gap) addresses for the 1st account. If there are transactions on these accounts, it scans the subsequent addresses and so on. By default the wallet will never scan the address with index 1,000,000 if it will found the transactions only on the first 5 addresses --> AGeneration of addresses and scanning will stop on the first 20 addresses.

So, making complex derivation paths or just manual settings for account and address indexes in BIP44 could help you to "hide" the addresses within the same secret seed. Example: "Generate a wallet, write down the seed and put it to a secret place. Make some operations with the wallet, for every new transaction the new address will be generated. Let's say we use only 100 first addresses in this way. Then manually generate at home the address for account 2055120551 and index 2055120551 (any numbers could be here within 2^32 range; i used for example postal index of Federal Reserve System 20551 concatenated twice)). These indexes are easy to remember. So, even somebody will found your secret seed, he will not found your hidden bitcoins with the path m/44/0/2055120551/0/2055120551, because he will see only the first 100 addresses where you made the transactions".

PS. BIP32 is old format. Now HD wallets use BIP44 for legacy addresses, BIP49 for segwit p2sh and BIP84 for native segwit