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not even Core uses it, yet it's responsible for more coin theft than anything.

fact, not opinion.

for all we know, no one in core uses or is paid in bitcoin

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No argument there.

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Could you point me in the direction of some reading material related to bip39's problems, I was genuinely unaware of it being controversial. Also might I ask what the best alternative is in your opinion?

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30 sats \ 6 replies \ @justin_shocknet 18 Jul -420 sats

Core's aversion to it seems to be mostly about cryptographic strength

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/88237/is-there-a-reason-to-why-bitcoin-core-does-not-implement-bip39

Haven't seen any great overall write-ups

Have seen other mentions about lack of versioning, and AI's potential to brute force, which coincides with cryptographic strength.

What I find most interesting is that it is the single greatest cause of stolen coin, through social engineering and inviting lazy storage

The alternative, at least how Core does it, is have you back up the seed and encrypt it.

Whether that's better is debatable, people lost coins that way too when it was more common. Harder to social engineer, but just as if not more easy to fuck up storage.

The other alternative is AEZEED, same social engineering weakness, but more obscure which mitigates that at least for now. If it became more popular that advantage would flip.

AEZEED also has versioning and better cryptographic strength as a direct response to criticism of BIP39, so it's "better" at least incrementally, but still doesn't really address the causes of lost coin thus far.

Key management is a fundamental CS issue for which there seems to be no ideal solution, key management faces the same challenges it has since systems started using it in the 70's/80's

I've given seriously thought to this and everything I think up comes back to moving trade-offs around. Better brainwallet tooling (and split brainwallet tooling for inheritance) may be the lowest hanging fruit and probably warrants some additional effort.