Bitcoin seed generation is the most important event for any Bitcoin holder, as without this seed your wallet and ultimately your money is lost. We as users trust hardware and air gapped wallets to be correct and honest in their seed generation, which is hard to verify. A new bring-your-own-entropy method was proposed on the Bitcoin dev mailing list by developer Ryan Havar to allow users to create randomness they trust.

Andrew Kozlik from SatoshiLabs calls the community for feedback on the new specification in SLIP-0039: Shamir’s Secret-Sharing for Mnemonic Codes. This standard aims to replace bip-39 giving extra security when working with mnemonic words for hardware wallet users.

Extended private keys are defined in BIP32¹ and are used to recover funds in case of a loss, but recovering a wallet using just the extended private keys is a tricky process and can sometimes fail to recover all the funds as some metadata can be missing. The current implemenation also has a weakness in which there is a limit to the incoming payment requests, handing out more than 20 incoming payment requests could lead to destruction of funds.

To remedy this issue, an early draft of a new serialization/encoding format for extended public and private keys was proposed on the Bitcoin-dev channel.