Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Randomly picking 24 words from the BIP39 wordlist
by
larry_vw_1955
on 09/12/2022, 01:56:25 UTC
Checksum in mnemonic algorithms serve more purpose than just error detection.
hopefully so

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And in Electrum they act as the version to announce the child address type that has to be derived and their derivation path.
that seems like a practical and useful use of it.

Quote from: ETFbitcoin
What exactly do you expect when the checksum only has 4-bit (for 12 words) and 8-bit (for 24 words) size?
i dont know  i guess i expected the probability of a false positive to be on the order of 1 in 2^32. is that so unreasonable?

A false positive error, or false positive, is a result that indicates a given condition exists (you entered the correct seed phrase) when it does not (you actually entered the wrong seed phrase).

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And that's why some wallet force their user to verify and re-enter some/all of generated words.
I'm not sure that completely solves the problem. But i guess it's better than nothing.  Shocked


Quote from: o_e_l_e_o
It also serves to discourage people from just opening up the wordlist and picking 12 or 24 words they like the look of, which as we all know is an incredibly insecure way of generating a seed phrase, but is one that we see people discussing as a possibility over and over again.
then it also serves to discourage people from legitimate uses of the wordlist such as flipping a coin or rolling dice to create their seed phrase.

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With a seed phrase, the words themselves serve as a sort of checksum. For example, compare these two addresses which have 1 character swapped:
Code:
bc1qyt4n4qvg86y33qfa7zts0wa8kv6ls47kmuyw5e, bc1qyt4n4qvq86y33qfa7zts0wa8kv6ls47kmuyw5e

you didn't swap anything.
bc1qyt4n4qvg86y33qfa7zts0wa8kv6ls47kmuyw5e
bc1qyt4n4qvq86y33qfa7zts0wa8kv6ls47kmuyw5e

but it would be trivial to see if you had by just lining them up like i did above.  


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And now look at this seed phrase, which has the exact same character swap:
Code:
decorate cactus vivid amazing endorse banana pipe train lazy viable ceilinq suffer

It is significantly easier to immediately spot the mistake in the seed phrase than it is in the address.
i don't see any mistake or character swap.  Huh not that i'm a wordlist junkie but those words all seem correctly spelled.