Hey Guys,
I’d like to propose a feature to bitcoin to solve the following problems:
- When people read or write private keys it is very easy to mistake a letter or
number.
- When entering a private key a mistake isn’t identified until the entire key
is entered.
- When an error is made in providing a private key the location of the error
isn’t indicated within the private key.
- Private keys stored on paper can be lost if a single character is damaged or
poorly transcribed.
The solution I’m proposing has two parts.
First provide an option to use to the NATO phonetic alphabet when displaying or
entertaining private keys. To indicate lower case the word should not be
capitalized. Capital letters and numbers should be capitalized.
The nato phonetic alphabet is a long-standing international standard (as
international as the use of letters and numbers already used in base58) and has
been designed to make each letter easily distinguishable when spoken and
written.
By using whole words, that are easily distinguishable and from a very short
word database (58 well known words that are either the English numbers or words
that begin with the letter indicated) the likelihood of errors in recovery are
reduced.
The second part of the solution is to insert checksum letters. If every 5th
word is actually a checksum for the previous 4 words, you end up with 13
sentences such as:
ALFA tango THREE SIX bravo
In this case bravo is actually a checksum for the previous 4 words and can be
calculated and verified as the private key is entered. If the user accidentally
trumped BRAVO instead of bravo the checksum would immediately indicate an error
within these 5 words (in most cases) making for a greatly improved user
experience.
An additional side effect of this is that even if an entire word is lost on
multiple lines, the checksum would probably make guessing the correct words
relatively easy.
I realize some of these issues have been discussed in relation to bip39, but I
hope this is more likely to be adopted by bitcoin core as it uses existing
private keys, has no impact on keygen, does not require a standardized and well
known word list for every language, and is essential just a display format that
hopefully wouldn’t require invasive code changes.
Thanks in advance for your feedback.
-JW
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