Interactive explainer of wallet seed phrases, entropy, and BIP39 \ stacker news ~bitcoin

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Interactive explainer of wallet seed phrases, entropy, and BIP39 bennet.org/blog/how-secure-is-your-bitcoin-wallets-mnemonic-seed-phrase/

3254 sats \ 13 comments \ @tombennet 9 Jul bitcoin

This started as a fun JS experiment for myself, exploring how seed phrases are built from entropy. After positive feedback from friends, I turned it into a full guide to wallet recovery phrases - covering entropy, checksums, SHA-256, and how it connects to HD wallets (in a hopefully accessible way).

It’s fully interactive - flip bits, see your mnemonic change. I hope it offers an intuitive way to understand what’s going on under the hood.

Feedback and suggestions very welcome.

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100 sats \ 2 replies \ @alexbit 10 Jul

Good stuff! I also liked the other article on your blog about an easy way for a website to receive Lightning payments.

For my service Bitcoin Is Data, I used BTCPay Server, and it was a pain to set it up correctly. If your solution had been available at the time, I would have chosen yours!

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10 sats \ 1 reply \ @tombennet OP 11 Jul

Thanks Alex! That's great to hear. Your site's awesome btw, just spent a while digging through your charts :D

I'm thinking of doing a tutorial showing how to accept on-chain payments while preserving privacy, i.e. without exposing the same receiving address to everyone. Reckon that would be useful to people?

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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @alexbit 11 Jul

For sure! A lot of people have entered the Bitcoin space in recent years, and many of them aren't as aware of Bitcoin tech as some of us who watched a lot of great technical content, from Andreas Antenopoulos, for example.

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100 sats \ 2 replies \ @OT 9 Jul

Very cool! I like how you can play around with it.

Will flipping the dice ever create an invalid checksum? I've tried this in wallet software just to enter random words. The last word is limited to get a valid check sum. I Still haven't really understood how the last word can't just be any from the list.

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100 sats \ 1 reply \ @tombennet OP 11 Jul

Thanks!

And no - you can use a dice to generate the first 128/192/256 bits of randomness, but the final 4 / 6 / 8 bits which are appended to the end are generated based on the hash of the dice-based randomness you generated. Note that those 4/6/8 bits (i.e. the checksum) take it to 132 / 198 / 264 bits in total - always a multiple of 11. That's because each 11 bits of data encodes a word. So the final word in any valid mnemonic will be determined in part by the hash of the previous words.

I've tried to visualise this in the 'Fingerprinting entropy' section. It's definitely a tricky one!

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