Rusty Russell's avatar
Rusty Russell rusty@rusty.ozlabs.org 1 month ago
@Jameson Lopp recently posted on X about the danger of "store and forget" for Bitcoin over decades. Unfortunately he's right. Originally I stored my raw private keys and UTXOs (on paper, care taken) figuring that was standard. Then bitcoin core stopped supporting them! Other wallets tend only to support them for sweeping, and I wonder how long. If I were storing funds today I would use BIP39. BIP93 is cool and more general, but not widely supported, and I don't know what support will look like in a decade.

Replies (8)

Kevin's Bacon's avatar
Kevin's Bacon _@kb.mynostr.com 1 month ago
You seriously think it's gonna be that hard to find a good wallet that supports an extremely widely used method of private key storage now that the asset and protocols are so widely used? I don't get that.
1 replies ↓
Judge Hardcase's avatar
Judge Hardcase 1 month ago
I think there is a broader, more general point to be made here: accepting your own responsibility for preserving some version of software (and hardware) necessary to use your private keys is just as prudent as accepting your own responsibility for preserving your private keys.
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Mnm 1 month ago
Will it be in 10 years? Will software then support non standard (legacy) features?
Rusty Russell's avatar
Rusty Russell rusty@rusty.ozlabs.org 1 month ago
Yes. Though you have to *start* with BIP39: you can't take a secret and ask "give me this as BIP39". You can with BIP93. The (multiple!) word lists are sub-optimal, the hashing is awkward and the checksum is so weak it makes me sad. But I ❤️ the 12 words. It's magic UX, which makes my primate brain happy.
Rusty Russell's avatar
Rusty Russell rusty@rusty.ozlabs.org 1 month ago
Bitcoin core no longer supports raw private keys, which is the simplest representation I can think of. Didn't see that coming. Maybe you're smarter than me.
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