Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP 39: Add language identifier strings for wordlists

From: 木ノ下じょな <kinoshitajona@gmail•com>
To: Pavol Rusnak <stick@satoshilabs•com>
Cc: Bitcoin Protocol Discussion <bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] BIP 39: Add language identifier strings for wordlists
Date: Mon, 8 Jan 2018 16:35:52 +0900	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CACvEmnGcN+VtgK0MeRPBevRoMkyJrMOBQKLZP4NnLBc5+q8Cyg@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <d05bfa26-4f3d-77d1-5801-9ad59497f334@satoshilabs.com>

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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"...
So instead I had him use Copay which generates Japanese words, wrote it
down 20x faster, and perfectly. Was able to recovery on the first try.
Imagine if I didn't tell him to try recovery before using it? (iirc Trezor
doesn't say to wipe and recover before using???)

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.
Even native English speakers who can't spell can mess it up badly too.

To be honest, a key storage format that doesn't support multiple languages
is much more dangerous than any doomsday situation you can think of for
supporting them.

BIP39 states that seed derivation is INDEPENDENT of wordlists, and that
failure to verify checksum (not knowing the wordlist falls under this)
should "WARN" the user and not fail, continuing to derive the seed anyways.
Currently the only wallet I know of following this part of the BIP is,
ironically Electrum. I can recover any BIP39 phrase from any wordlist even
if Electrum doesn't know it.

I really hope you reconsider multi-language support for everything moving
forward.

I understand it's a nightmare to plan for and support, which is fine if you
were just developing a piece of software sold by a company based in a
western country... but you are trying to make a standard for an
international currency. Defining "everyone should only use English, because
ASCII is easier to plan for" is not a good way to move forward as a
currency.

I am just thinking of all the users I will have to help out down the road
when they come crying to me saying they can't recover, and it turns out
they wrote down some non-English gibberish in roman characters claiming "I
wrote the English just as it was on the screen!" and I have to write a
brute force script to try all the word combinations for the mystery words.
(I have done this before)

Just my two cents. Not to be accusatory or anything.
Please reconsider. Thanks.

2018-01-08 0:16 GMT+09:00 Pavol Rusnak via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>:

> On 05/01/18 14:58, nullius via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > I propose and request as an enhancement that the BIP 39 wordlist set
> > should specify canonical native language strings to identify each
> > wordlist, as well as short ASCII language codes.  At present, the
> > languages are identified only by their names in English.
>
> I am advising not to use any other language than English for BIP39. I
> got persuaded to allow more languages when writing BIP39 spec, but I
> learned that it was something I should've been more persistently against.
>
> I am currently drafting a new standard[1] which will allow also Shamir
> Secret Scheme Splitting and there we disallow usage of a custom wordlist
> in order to eradicate this mess. Will try to push this as BIP too once
> we get it to the point we are OK with the contents.
>
> https://github.com/satoshilabs/slips/blob/master/slip-0039.md
>
> --
> Best Regards / S pozdravom,
>
> Pavol "stick" Rusnak
> CTO, SatoshiLabs
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> bitcoin-dev mailing list
> bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org
> https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
>
>

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