Alternative approach to Shamir's secret sharing about slips

[rkagerer]

Padding is a natural way to get rid of the ambiguity.

For what it's worth, I made a proof-of-concept fork of Ian's work a while back which implements dynamic padding. I called it Shamir39b and there's documentation. Did it because I wanted to explore the ability to include a passphrase (or other small, arbitrary text) in the shares.

[prusnak]

We did some substantial improvements to our standard and we feel it's moving into right direction. Feel free to comment: https://github.com/satoshilabs/slips/blob/master/slip-0039.md

[onvej-sl]

I went through Shamir39 by iancoleman. There is a significant difference between our approaches. SLIP39 is supposed to substitute BIP39 whereas Shamir39 works in cooperation with BIP39.

The reason we use 10-bit words instead of 11-bit ones is we want the dictionary to meet some criteria (e.g. all words are commonly used, all words have unique 4-letter prefix, no word is shorter than 4 letters and longer than 8 letters).

In my opinion allowing more than 32 shares isn't necessary for practical use.

Padding is a natural way to get rid of the ambiguity. We will definitely consider it. The disadvantage of a padding is that it is always at least one bit long. Which means that in our case 128-bit seed becomes one word longer.