[Ethereum] Are mnemonic seeds or hierarchical deterministic wallets standardized

brain-walletshd-walletspaper-wallets

Some wallets for Bitcoin and Ethereum will give you a list of about 15 words to write down instead of giving you a private key.

From what I understand, the list of words is derived from the key, and can be used to recreate it.

The question I have, is basically whether or not ALL (or virtually all) implementations of this system are compatible. Imagine I try to recover my wallet using the seed years later on a totally different wallet. Can I be confident it will work. Are all seed mnemonics using the exact same math, and will they likely continue with the same scheme (or a backwards compatible one) decades from now?

Best Answer

There are several bitcoin standards related to creating keys from mnemonic seeds.

BIP 39 for making mnemonics to create a seed: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki

BIP 32 for deriving keys from that seed: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0032.mediawiki

However, not all clients use all these standards (eg Electrum's mnemonic implementation is different - I think it pre-dates the standard and the developers weren't really happy with the standard) and there's a little bit of room for different ways of implementing things even if you're trying to follow it; For example, a wallet is allowed to have different derivation paths for different "accounts", but it doesn't have to.

So no, you can't quite be confident your seed will still work as is on an arbitrary future wallet, although it might. But if there's a lot of money in there it should be possible to dig out the way the old wallet was doing the thing and re-implement enough of it to get your private keys out.

Javascript

LightWallet

Ethereumjs – Different Address with Single Mnemonic Phrase

Your problem resides on lines 7 and 8 where you are feeding the seed hex into the fromMasterSeed function. What you should be doing is feeding the raw seed in. When you do so, you end up with identical output as freewallet.org:

Web3 = require('web3');
bip39 = require('bip39')
etherHDkey = require('ethereumjs-wallet/hdkey')
ethUtil = require('ethereumjs-util')

mnemonic = bip39.generateMnemonic()
seed = bip39.mnemonicToSeed(mnemonic)
HDwallet = etherHDkey.fromMasterSeed(seed)
zeroWallet = HDwallet.derivePath("m/44'/60'/0'/0/0").getWallet();
console.log(mnemonic)
console.log(seed)
console.log(`Address: ${zeroWallet.getAddressString()}`);
console.log(`Private Key: ${zeroWallet.getPrivateKeyString()}`);

Output:

soldier mechanic sleep gym extend bone bundle price exhaust solar attack whale
<Buffer f0 80 57 49 3c 24 2c 4d 93 d6 c7 77 26 a7 40 37 8b 79 ed 83 8d 61 fb 57 36 43 44 41 69 bb 57 a8 46 21 71 b5 93 de ea 9c 4b 0c ea dd 70 81 cb 8c 8a 33 ... >
Address: 0x666e89cef3d251774f17e82c5a98e3622dd82dd8
Private Key: 0xf0e65787415522d260fce50ddfff4c4506714d58ee39f9a548b0102fa1d3be69

Which matches with freewallet.org's output identically.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Ethereum] What Hierarchical Deterministic (HD) wallets are available for Ethereum

Javascript

Ethereumjs – Different Address with Single Mnemonic Phrase

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