iancoleman stopped updating?

[Forsyth Jones]

I am concerned about the update support of the iancoleman/bip39 project, it's currently the most powerful mnemonic recovery/creation tool we currently have and easy to use and learn.

On github, the last update we had was in 2023/Aug. Some have already asked to bring support for BIP341 (taproot addresses) to view taproot addresses (although you can view the private keys but not the address itself on the website).

There is an alternative to iancoleman, which is seedtools, which supports the visualization of taproot addresses on the bitcoin network, but I think the project has some limitations in relation to iancoleman, such as not having a custom derivation path.

Do you think the project update may have stopped?

[logfiles]

You are right, there isn't any much activity in the repository.  iancoleman seems to be taken up by another side project (safe network) where he has been active up until around after March where he went silent.

The alternative is pretty good and there is no limitation when it comes to custom derivation path if you look closely. The only major difference I see is it does not support altcoins like the iancoleman tool does.

[Forsyth Jones]

You are right, there isn't any much activity in the repository.  iancoleman seems to be taken up by another side project (safe network) where he has been active up until around after March where he went silent.

The alternative is pretty good and there is no limitation when it comes to custom derivation path if you look closely. The only major difference I see is it does not support altcoins like the iancoleman tool does.

As you can see, you can switch between BIP44, 49, 84, 86 and BIP32

In BIP32 the derivation path is m/0'/0'/_index_ I don't know of any wallet that uses this path, the closest thing to this is the old Bitcoin core wallet format - legacy format (m/0'/0'/_index_') which are hardened keys/addresses.

In this tool, it's not possible to change the derivation path beyond m/0'/0'/_index_

[ranochigo]

He created an issue for it himself: https://github.com/iancoleman/bip39/issues/507. There appears to be no work done on it on the repo to be merged after and I assume that there wasn't any PR to integrate it either.

[NotATether]

In BIP32 the derivation path is m/0'/0'/_index_ I don't know of any wallet that uses this path, the closest thing to this is the old Bitcoin core wallet format - legacy format (m/0'/0'/_index_') which are hardened keys/addresses.

In this tool, it's not possible to change the derivation path beyond m/0'/0'/_index_

That is because the first 3 numbers, represent purpose, coin type, and account respectively: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0044.mediawiki#user-content-Path_levels

Purpose is for the BIP number, coin type being for altcoins and the account number is usually 0 but it provides a degree of freedom for you to create more wallets out of a single seed phrase.

The least two numbers are reserved for "change" and the actual address index.

It wouldn't make much sense to open up the BIP32 indexing to arbitrary paths. Besides, I think Taproot's BIP32 path is m/86'/0'/0' or something.

Unfortunately the bech32 addresses generated by iancoleman do not apply to taproot because they are missing the added checksum in bech32m.

[pooya87]

That's the problem with all open source (free work) projects. Everyone wants to use them but rarely anybody wants to contribute. Look at the contributions on the BIP39 project. And let's just say that the quality is not as high as quantity if you look at the commits individually.

Starters of such projects usually don't keep up doing "free work" forever. You usually get too busy in real life and move on to other things, maybe only coming back from time to time.