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42-Most wallets implement BIP32 which defines how a BIP32 root key can be used to derive keychains. As a consequence, a backup of just the BIP32 root key is sufficient to include all keys derived from it. BIP32 does not have a human friendly serialization of the BIP32 root key (or BIP32 extended keys in general) which makes paper backups or manually restoring the key more error-prone. BIP39 was designed to solve this problem but rather than serialize the BIP32 root key, it takes some entropy, encoded to a "seed mnemonic", which is then hashed to derive the BIP39 seed which can be turned into the BIP32 root key. Saving the BIP39 mnemonic is enough to reconstruct the entire BIP32 keychain, but a BIP32 root key cannot be reversed back to the BIP39 mnemonic.
43+Most wallets implement BIP32 which defines how a BIP32 root key can be used to derive keychains. As a consequence, a backup of just the BIP32 root key is sufficient to include all keys derived from it. BIP32 does not have a human-friendly serialization of the BIP32 root key (or BIP32 extended keys in general), which makes paper backups or manually restoring the key more error-prone. BIP39 was designed to solve this problem, but rather than serialize the BIP32 root key, it takes some entropy, encoded to a "seed mnemonic", which is then hashed to derive the BIP39 seed, which can be turned into the BIP32 root key. Saving the BIP39 mnemonic is enough to reconstruct the entire BIP32 keychain, but a BIP32 root key cannot be reversed back to the BIP39 mnemonic.
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45-Most wallets implement BIP39, so on initialization or restoration, the user must interact with a BIP39 mnemonic. Most wallets do not support BIP32 extended private keys, so each wallet must either share the same BIP39 mnemonic, or have a separate BIP39 mnemonic entirely. Neither scenarios are particularly satisfactory for security reasons. For example, some wallets may be inherently less secure like hot wallets on smartphones, Join Market servers, or Lightning Network nodes. Having multiple seeds is far from desirable, especially for those who rely on split key or redundancy backups in different geological locations. Adding is necessarily difficult and may result in users being more lazy with subsequent keys, resulting in compromised security or loss of keys.
46+Most wallets implement BIP39, so on initialization or restoration, the user must interact with a BIP39 mnemonic. Most wallets do not support BIP32 extended private keys, so each wallet must either share the same BIP39 mnemonic, or have a separate BIP39 mnemonic entirely. Neither scenario is particularly satisfactory for security reasons. For example, some wallets may be inherently less secure, like hot wallets on smartphones, Join Market servers, or Lightning Network nodes. Having multiple seeds is far from desirable, especially for those who rely on split key or redundancy backups in different geological locations. Adding keys is necessarily difficult and may result in users being more lazy with subsequent keys, resulting in compromised security or loss of keys.
0Most wallets implement BIP39, so on initialization or restoration, the user must interact with a BIP39 mnemonic. Most wallets do not support BIP32 extended private keys, so each wallet must either share the same BIP39 mnemonic, or have a separate BIP39 mnemonic entirely. Neither scenario is particularly satisfactory for security reasons. For example, some wallets may be inherently less secure, like hot wallets on smartphones, JoinMarket servers, or Lightning Network nodes. Having multiple seeds is far from desirable, especially for those who rely on split key or redundancy backups in different geological locations. Adding keys is necessarily difficult and may result in users being more lazy with subsequent keys, resulting in compromised security or loss of keys.