We’ve been taking a break for the past two months while working on a website upgrade. Since we did not cover news in that time, we decided to make a series of recap articles covering the last two months, starting with news related Bitcoin Core and going through Lightning Network and its related updates.

There was a discussion on BIP39 seeds and the probability of getting a valid BIP39 using randomly chosen words, otherwise known as brute forcing. The probability is about 1:256 for 24 words and 1:16 for 12 words. This is meant to change drastically with SLIP 39, proposed last year, SLIP 39 describes a standard implementation of Shamir’s secret-sharing, which splits a secret into unique parts which can be distributed among participants.

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.