Hello,
I have an interest in creating a paper wallet, well not the kind that has a private key in a QR code, but more one that can rebuild the entire wallet from seed bytes using a QR code.
Now I realise that BIP32 enables this feature via HD wallets being build from an initial seed derived from a BIP39 mnemonic phrase no worries, however I also note that the core developers have expressed that they don't really have any desire to implement HD wallets into Bitcoin Core due to allowing the more novel features to go into 3rd party wallet software.
Since when? Where did you hear that? Wherever you did, they were lying to you. The Core devs are actually changing their wallet to be a BIP32 HD wallet. The only problem is the way that the wallet is integrated into everything else and separating the wallet to then changing it to support BIP32 is a huge task which Jonas Schnelli is actively working on.
Ok that's fair enough, but I had a thought. Currently the wallet.dat created in Bitcoin Core pre-generates 100 private keys, so if you backup the wallet then and ther you should in theory be good for the next 100 recieves. But I need to store a file. I want to store a QR code printed on paper.
So I'm thinking that the 100 pre-generated keys are just made from random entopy bytes not chained is that right? So new random bytes are generated for each of the pre-generated private keys?
What if instead of doing that, we used a set of random seed bytes + generated 1st private key and then hashed that private key to generate the next private key and then so on and so forth chaining all the private keys.
I actually have devised a better way of doing this and I am oversimplifying it in descryption, however ultimately this would allow me to have a QR code containing just my random seed bytes (or BIP 39 mnemonic or whatever is decided) and from there I can restore my wallet in it's entirety.
Again I realise that BIP32 achieves this, however BIP32 has far more functionality allowing the creation of accounts and child keys under each account etc. Given the core dev teams lack of interest to implement BIP32, I'm proposing a far easier, basic, less functional version of BIP32 for which I imagine be called Simply Deterministic wallets.
This would be super easy to implement, thoughts?
Nope. What you described is fairly unsafe as if someone got their hands on one of your private keys, they could derive the rest of the private keys.
