From 0d1b892ddb21c22def4af4541bfed7a2a3480e4a Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: Anthony Towns Date: Sun, 31 May 2026 17:05:50 +1000 Subject: [PATCH] BIP-39: Add shortcomings and related work section, drop comments headers. --- bip-0039.mediawiki | 18 ++++++++++++++++-- 1 file changed, 16 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/bip-0039.mediawiki b/bip-0039.mediawiki index 2a68b5e6..2a6118b2 100644 --- a/bip-0039.mediawiki +++ b/bip-0039.mediawiki @@ -6,8 +6,6 @@ Pavol Rusnak Aaron Voisine Sean Bowe - Comments-Summary: Unanimously Discourage for implementation - Comments-URI: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/wiki/Comments:BIP-0039 Status: Deployed Type: Specification Assigned: 2013-09-10 @@ -138,6 +136,22 @@ Also see https://github.com/bip32JP/bip32JP.github.io/blob/master/test_JP_BIP39. (Japanese wordlist test with heavily normalized symbols as passphrase) +==Shortcomings== + +Some shortcomings have been identified with this proposal: + +* Generated seed depends on the wordlist that was used for the mnemonic. Because the "mnemonic to seed" process uses the mnemonic sentence directly rather than the original entropy, translating the mnemonic to a different wordlist necessarily creates a completely different seed. This is not an issue if you only support the English wordlist, as recommended above. + +* Because the seed is generated by hashing the mnemonic, it is not possible to represent an arbitrary BIP-0032 seed via a BIP-0039 sentence: the conversion is one-way only (from BIP-0039 sentence to BIP-0032 seed). + +* The checksum is short. This means it only gives modest odds of catching random errors (1-in-256 errors will be missed). It is also not able to provide any assistance in correcting errors. + +* No versioning scheme. When originally introduced, there was no way to distinguish the address format that should be used for a BIP-0039 key. This is now largely mitigated by use of descriptor wallets (BIP-0380) in addition to a seed however. + +==Related Work== + +The authors of BIP-0039 proposed the [https://github.com/satoshilabs/slips/blob/master/slip-0039.md SLIP-0039] scheme as an intended successor to BIP-0039 improving on the above shortcomings. + ==Reference Implementation== Reference implementation including wordlists is available from