© 2020 Blockchain Commons
Author: Wolf McNally
Date: April 22, 2020
The content below is now deprecated and of historical interest only.
[BIP173] "Bech32" is a checksummed base32 format, and a standard for native segregated witness output addresses.
A scheme for using Bech32 encoding for generalized cryptographic seeds is proposed. [BIP173] defines not only the syntactical format, but also a segwit version byte that is unnecessary for encoding a simple string of pseudorandom data.
For cryptographic seeds, the "human readable part" (HRP) of the Bech32 encoding shall be seed. This means that bech32-encoded cryptographic seeds will be recognizable by starting with the characters seed1 (The HRP + the mandatory numeral 1 divider.)
The payload of the seed shall be a minimum of 1 byte and a maximum of 64 bytes.
The payload of the seed shall be encoded as per [BIP173], leaving out the segwit version byte.
The checksum of the seed shall be calculated as per [Bech32bis].
| Length | Hex/Bech32 |
|---|---|
| 1 | eeseed1acu7gj09 |
| 16 | 012f984d5b30831d4a256cdbcc0d5029seed1qyhesn2mxzp36j39dnducr2s9y5fu50r |
| 32 | 80c35bd93dbbf67cdc046cb6eb2fb8f0fefe4aaefd71b23fe9aa337a5b537e19seed1srp4hkfah0m8ehqydjmwktac7rl0uj4wl4cmy0lf4geh5k6n0cvsj4f3dy |
| 64 | a2e77b0f0147801c3cc34c6341716e4fed12005e664820bacf0f6b5eabb1fcfff5ca2bdd1a25dc4f7354df3a430a7bce2d8eb63ae69e7e90a8f689002cae156aseed15tnhkrcpg7qpc0xrf335zutwflk3yqz7veyzpwk0pa44a2a3lnlltj3tm5dzthz0wd2d7wjrpfauutvwkcawd8n7jz50dzgq9jhp26sxcqn82 |
- [BIP173] Pieter Wuille et al, Base32 address format for native v0-16 witness outputs
- [Bech32bis] Pieter Wuille, Analysis of insertion in Bech32 strings