[Bitcoin-development] BIP0039 Mnemonic code for generating deterministic keys

[Jorge Timón]

This will probably sound stupid to most of you, but I'll say it anyway.

The aim of mnemonics is to easily remember, isn't it?
But the approach of removing "offensive words" is probably
counterproductive to achieving that end. These words cause a greater
emotional impact in our human moral psyches.
If we were willing to use that fact in our advantage to optimize the
"maximum unforgettableness" criterion, we should actually prefer the
most generally offensive words in that list. Specially if they can
combine with each other to produce more offensive results, basically
the opposite of what we're doing.

Isn't "legalize murder dirty jew" much easier to remember for most
people than "sandwich house yellow cauliflower"?

I guess that even if I'm right, this will be hard to explain to users
and I'm not offering myself to do it. So I completely understand if
the people working on this BIP simply ignore this "unforgettable
wordlist" proposal like if it was just a bad taste joke.
Using the sub-optimal (in terms of human memory) politically correct
wordlist probably won't be that much worse.


On 10/24/13, slush <slush at centrum.cz> wrote:
> We've reflected many comments about BIP39 wordlist from the community and I
> think the wordlist is much better now. Specifically we removed many of
> theoretically offensive words as well as we implemented algorithm for
> detecting words with similar characters (cat/eat) and we resolved these
> duplicities. I'm now quite happy with the wordlist and I want to ask you
> for next (final?) round of comments.
>
> >From other features, we added password protection of seed and seed
> hardening (against bruteforcing) using Rijndael cipher. This has been
> chosen because its blocksize can be 128, 192 or 256 bits, so it fits length
> of desired seeds. Also there are Rijndael implementations in every
> language. Btw password protection has one interesting feature - plausible
> deniability. It allows user to have one mnemonic and by using it with
> different passwords, it will generate different BIP32 wallets.... (wink
> wink)
>
> I want to be pretty clear that we need to close this topic somehow, because
> we want to use such algorithm in Trezor (which deadline is coming quick)
> and also other wallet developers want to implement such algorithm into
> clients to be compatible with Trezor. There were quite strict requirements
> for such algorithm (like the possibility to convert mnemonic to seed as
> well as seed to mnemonic) and I think we found a good solution. I'm wildly
> asking you for constructive comments, but saying "it's a crap, I don't like
> it" won't help anything.
>
> Thanks,
> slush
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 12, 2013 at 6:02 PM, Matthew Mitchell <
> matthewmitchell at godofgod.co.uk> wrote:
>
>> I removed some more but I haven't added enough back in. It was taking far
>> longer than expected so I gave up, but maybe someone else can try to add
>> some more:
>>
>>
>> https://github.com/MatthewLM/python-mnemonic/blob/master/mnemonic/wordlist/english.txt
>>
>> On 12 Sep 2013, at 13:11, Pavol Rusnak <stick at gk2.sk> wrote:
>>
>> > On 10/09/13 23:03, Matthew Mitchell wrote:
>> >> Maybe it would have been better without the aggressive words?
>> >
>> > I revisited the wordlist and replaced around 67 words that can be
>> > found offensive in some context.
>> >
>> > --
>> > Best Regards / S pozdravom,
>> >
>> > Pavol Rusnak <stick at gk2.sk>
>> >
>> >
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-- 
Jorge Timón

http://freico.in/