12 and 24 seed-phrases

[m2017]

I had a few questions, the answers to which I wanted to fill in my gaps in knowledge. I won't say that these are critical questions, but they haunt me.

Was it originally possible to choose a 12 and 24 word bitcoin wallet seed-phrase as it is now, or did the ability to choose 24 words come later? That is, a kind of option: reliable and more reliable. If the seed-phrase was expanded to 24 words later, what was the reason for this? What reason prompted? If anyone is aware of those events.

In the modern world, technology is progressing very quickly and one day there may come a moment when the reliability of a 24-word seed phrase will not be enough (it looks like the eternal fight between a shield and a sword). Is it possible to solve this problem by increasing the number of words to 36 or 48? Are there discussions or work on this issue?

Many thanks.

[1714158622]

1714158622

[1714158622]

1714158622

[1714158622]

1714158622

[1714158622]

1714158622

[ABCbits]

Was it originally possible to choose a 12 and 24 word bitcoin wallet seed-phrase as it is now, or did the ability to choose 24 words come later? That is, a kind of option: reliable and more reliable.

For seed-phrase which follow BIP 39 standard, both 12 and 24 words comes out at the same time since the specification mention you can generate 12, 15, 18, 21 or 24 words. But IIRC 12 seed-phrase words generated by Electrum comes out before BIP 39 standard exists.

Are there discussions or work on this issue?

AFAIK no since 12/24 seed-phrase words is deemed secure enough.

[nc50lc]

In the modern world, technology is progressing very quickly and one day there may come a moment when the reliability of a 24-word seed phrase will not be enough (it looks like the eternal fight between a shield and a sword). Is it possible to solve this problem by increasing the number of words to 36 or 48?

Yes, increasing the number of words generally increases its security. Rather, larger entropy will be encoded into more words.
It's as simple as: the higher the entropy, the higher its security: 2^256 (24 words minus checksum) is stronger than  2^128 (12 words minus checksum).
But 2^128 is currently secure enough.

Was it originally possible to choose a 12 and 24 word bitcoin wallet seed-phrase as it is now, or did the ability to choose 24 words come later? That is, a kind of option: reliable and more reliable. If the seed-phrase was expanded to 24 words later, what was the reason for this? What reason prompted? If anyone is aware of those events.

In BIP39 standard, it's always been possible to generate 24word seed phrase ever since it's proposed.
But the option in different wallets/client to generate 12 or 24 words by default depends on their own implementation of BIP39.
They can go higher than 24 if they decided to do so.

For non-BIP39 wallets, it also differs per wallet since it's their own implementation of "seed phrase"; for that, research each wallet's history.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Was it originally possible to choose a 12 and 24 word bitcoin wallet seed-phrase as it is now, or did the ability to choose 24 words come later?

Not sure why you are asking this since I already answered you a week ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5419384.msg61243243#msg61243243

In the modern world, technology is progressing very quickly and one day there may come a moment when the reliability of a 24-word seed phrase will not be enough

If a 24 word seed phrase with 256 bits of entropy is no longer secure, then bitcoin private keys with 128 bits of security would have been insecure a long time ago. Your seed phrase will be the least of your worries in that scenario.

You can already create seed phrases with as many words as you like (and indeed, any word list you like, if you so choose). Doing so is highly inadvisable though, since you gain no additional security but add a significant risk of not being able to recover your wallets.

But IIRC 12 seed-phrase words generated by Electrum comes out before BIP 39 standard exists.

Original Electrum seed phrases were 13 words or fewer, which encoded 136 bits of data (128 bits of entropy plus 8 bits of version data). On the one out of 16 occasions that the first 4 bits were 0000, then the seed phrase would be 12 words. Otherwise, it would be 13 words.

[ABCbits]

But IIRC 12 seed-phrase words generated by Electrum comes out before BIP 39 standard exists.

Original Electrum seed phrases were 13 words or fewer, which encoded 136 bits of data (128 bits of entropy plus 8 bits of version data). On the one out of 16 occasions that the first 4 bits were 0000, then the seed phrase would be 12 words. Otherwise, it would be 13 words.

Which Electrum version you're talking about? On Electrum 0.29 which i've tested on early 2022[1] show it generate 12 words with 128-bit seed (indicated by 32 character HEX on generated wallet seed). The source code for seed generation state it use 2^128 range[2].

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5379817.msg58942538#msg58942538
[2] https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/5883aaf8ca2f79bf694d11ac6b63f5defd2a2c38/client/electrum.py#L267-L269

[o_e_l_e_o]

Oh my bad, I misspoke. I was talking about Electrum seed phrases prior to the release of BIP39, when they switched over to using the BIP39 wordlist instead of their own list. But you are right, the original Electrum seed phrases based on their wordlist of 1626 words and without any checksum or version data were indeed 12 words, encoding 128 bits.

Looks like it was in version 2.7 that they went back to only generating 12 word seed phrases: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/blob/e054e9f14eb7fa0308262b15fbe8386d08e1b77c/RELEASE-NOTES#L1226-L1229

[m2017]

Was it originally possible to choose a 12 and 24 word bitcoin wallet seed-phrase as it is now, or did the ability to choose 24 words come later?

Not sure why you are asking this since I already answered you a week ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5419384.msg61243243#msg61243243

I'll have to clarify the question.
Here I asked if it was possible to create 24 words initially in the first versions of the electrum application or if this possibility appeared later.
This question is not related to the question I asked in another thread. Unless it concerns 12 and 24 words.
I repeat, I don't think that this is an overarching question, but rather a small digression into the historical past of electrum wallet.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Here I asked if it was possible to create 24 words initially in the first versions of the electrum application or if this possibility appeared later.

In the first versions of Electrum - no. The seed phrases were fixed at 12 words from a wordlist of 1626 words, encoding 128 bits of data. They later switched to phrases of up to 13 words so they could also include version data, before then switching back to 12 word phrases but using the BIP39 wordlist of 2048 words.

The first appearance of the make_seed command in Electrum, which allows the easy creation of seed phrases with user chosen lengths, was on August 28, 2014: https://github.com/spesmilo/electrum/commit/4dcdcbc068d0d42ac7edc27c7d618b53cb6f706d

And as discussed before, for BIP39, both 12 and 24 word seed phrases were defined in the same document, so were essentially released simultaneously.

[fennic]

I think that 25 phrase is more reliable and has more security and also I wanna say that by having such high security will save our assets from scams and other such things and that make us very very comfortable doing this. And also I wanna say that We should have at least Hard wallet.

[nc50lc]

I think that 25 phrase is more reliable and has more security

If that's the case, then "26 phrase" is better, or better yet 27 words~  :P

Anyways,
Linking the seed phrase's number of words or wallet's security to scam is unreasonable, people get scammed even if they are using hardware wallets.
Scammers are fooling victims into sending them funds willingly, so the issue isn't the wallet's security.

[hosseinimr93]

I think that 25 phrase is more reliable and has more security

A seed phrase can't include 25 words. The number of words should be 12, 15, 18, 21 or 24 and as already said in the previous posts, a 12 word seed phrase is secure enough.
By a 25 word seed phrase, you may mean a 24 word seed phrase which has been extended by an additional word or characters. If that's the case, note that the 25th word isn't a part of the seed phrase. That's called passphrase.