On 2018-01-08 at 07:35:52 +0000, 木ノ下じょな <kinoshitajona@gmail.com> wrote:

This is very sad.

The number one problem in Japan with BIP39 seeds is with English words.

I have seen a 60 year old Japanese man writing down his phrase (because he kept on failing recovery), and watched him write down "aneter" for "amateur"...

[...]

If you understand English and can spell, you read a word, your brain processes the word, and you can spell it on your own when writing down.  Not many Japanese people can do that, so they need to copy letter for letter, taking a long time, and still messing up on occasion.

[...]

Defining "everyone should only use English, because ASCII is easier to plan for" is not a good way to move forward as a currency.

Well said.  Thank you for telling of these experiences.  Now please, let’s put the shoe on the other foot.

I ask everybody who wants an English-only mnemonic standard to entrust *their own money* to their abilities to very, very carefully write this down—then later, type it back in:

すさん　たんろ　りゆう　しもん　ていおん　しとう
とこや　はやい　おうさま　ほくろ　けちゃっふ　たもつ

(Approximate translation:  “Whatever would you do if Bitcoin had been invented by somebody named Satoshi Nakamoto?”)

No, wait:  That is only a 12-word mnemonic.  We are probably talking about a Trezor; so now, hey you there, stake the backup of your life’s savings on your ability to handwrite *this*:

にあう　しひょう　にんすう　ひえる　かいこう　いのる　ねんし　はあさん　ひこく
とうく　きもためし　そなた　こなこな　にさんかたんそ　ろんき　めいあん　みわく
へこむ　すひょう　おやゆひ　ふせく　けさき　めいきょく　こんまけ

Ready to bet your money on *that* as a backup phrase in your own hands?  No?  Then please, stop demanding that others risk *their* money on the inverse case.

----

If you cheat here by having studied Japanese, then remember that many Japanese people know English and other European languages, too.  Then think of how much money would be lost by your non-Japanese-literate family and friends—if BIP 39 had only Japanese wordlists, and your folks needed to wrestle with the above phrases as their “mnemonics”.

In such cases, the phrases cannot be called “mnemonics” at all.  A “mnemonic” implies aid to memory.  Gibberish in a wholly alien writing system is much worse even than transcribing pseudorandom hex strings.  The Japanese man in the quoted story, who wrote “aneter” for “amateur”, was not dealing with a *mnemonic*:  He was using the world’s most inefficient means of making cryptic bitstrings *less* userfriendly.

----

I began this thread with a quite simple request:  Is “日本語” an appropriate string for identifying the Japanese language to Japanese users?  And what of the other strings I posted for other languages?

I asked this as an implementer working on my own instance of the greatest guard against vendor lock-in and stale software:  Independent implementations.  —  I asked, because obviously, I myself do not speak all these different languages; and I want to implement them all.  *All.*

Some replies have been interesting in their own right; but thus far, nobody has squarely addressed the substance of my question.

Most worrisome is that much of the discussion has veered into criticism of multi-language support.  I opened with a question about other languages, and I am getting replies which raise a hue and cry of “English only!”

Though I am fluent and literate in English, I am uninterested in ever implementing any standard of this nature which is artificially restricted to English.  I am fortunate; for as of this moment, we have a standard called “BIP 39” which has seven non-English wordlists, and four more pending in open pull requests (#432, #442, #493, #621).

I request discussion of language identification strings appropriate for use with that standard.

(P.S., I hope that my system did not mangle anything in the foregoing.  I have seen weird copypaste behaviour mess up decomposed characters.  I thought of this after I searched for and collected some visually fascinating phrases; so I tried to normalize these to NFC...  It should go without saying, easyseed output the Japanese perfectly!)

--
nullius@nym.zone | PGP ECC: 0xC2E91CD74A4C57A105F6C21B5A00591B2F307E0C
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3NULL3ZCUXr7RDLxXeLPDMZDZYxuaYkCnG)  (PGP RSA: 0x36EBB4AB699A10EE)
“‘If you’re not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to hide.’
No!  Because I do nothing wrong, I have nothing to show.” — nullius

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