@ukio 25 January 2021 more from that month

Into the Rabbit Hole #2: Overview of BIP-32 / BIP-39 / BIP-43 / BIP-44 Wallet Standards Trying to understand how wallets work and how they are secured, I came across the following BIP standards (note: "BIP" stands for "Bitcoin Improvement Proposal" and is the way how to propose new standards to Bitcoin). So here is a short overview of a few BIPs I looked at: BIP-32 - Hierarchical Deterministic Wallets https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki the standard for generating hierarchical deterministic wallets (i.e. "HD Wallets") describes how hierarchical structure of keys and addresses is generated from a single master key (a.k.a. "wallet seed") use cases include multi-account wallets, wallet sharing, etc.. if you are interested in the technical details on how a wallet is created --> this BIP is for you! BIP-39 - Mnemonic code for generating deterministic keys https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki defines how a usually 12 or 24 word mnemonic sentence (a.k.a. "seed phrase") is used to (re-)create a BIP32 wallet the mnemonic sentence should be combined with a passphrase, and both together are used to create the actual master key ("wallet seed") the 12-24 words are usually chosen from this wordlist and are better for humans to deal with than a "raw" private key (easy to back up on paper or even steel, good error correction properties, etc..) https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039/english.txt BIP-43 - Purpose Field for Deterministic Wallets https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0043.mediawiki tackles a shortcoming of BIP32 (i.e. the fact that it does not define how the actual hierarchical structure should look like) is kind of a "meta" BIP and just defines that the 1st level of the hierarchy is the "purpose" which should refer to a subsequent BIP which defines the structure underneath general BIP43 structure is  `m / purpose' / *` , where for example BIP44 should use `m / 44' / *` , etc... (you get the point) BIP-44 - Multi-Account Hierarchy for Deterministic Wallets https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0044.mediawiki is a concrete implementation of BIP43 describing the hierarchical structure for a multi-account hierarchy it defines 5 levels in the BIP44 path:  `m / purpose' / coin_type' / account' / change / address_index` *purpose*: is a constant set to "44" *coin_type*: defines the type of coin, e.g. BTC, ETH, etc... (see registered coin types here) https://github.com/satoshilabs/slips/blob/master/slip-0044.md *account*: allows to define separate accounts to manage the funds *change*: specifies if the address is on an external chain ("0") or internal chain ("1") *address_index*: denotes the index of the address being generated in addition to the levels, it also specifies the "account discovery" algorithm This was a really short, high level overview (it helps me keeping an overview of what the BIPs are on that level....)   If you want to know more details, I highly recommend to delve into the BIPs themselves. By the way... looking myself for a wallet, I found https://walletsrecovery.org/ provides a good overview of different HW / SW wallets. (I haven't chosen one though) (note: this has been cross-posted from here) https://www.publish0x.com/journey-of-a-crypto-noob/into-the-rabbit-hole-2-overview-of-bip-32-bip-39-bip-43-bip-xerenlp