I see many newbies having trouble with recovery of BIP39 mnemonics when they don't know the mnemonic path, especially if created by a wallet that used a non-standard path. I am motivated to help them, while steering them away from dangerous alternative choices such as web-based seed derivation tools or giving their seeds to strangers in return for promises of help (both of which are often proposed on various forums). While this can be solved with a full node and a rescan, such a solution is not useful for newbies as it is too complex. A GUI-based self-hosted multi-platform solution like Electrum, that already has access to indexed UTXO scripts seems to fit perfectly with the use case and be more secure than alternatives.
I would like to fund a plugin that allows Electrum to import a BIP39 mnemonic such that it "scans" several possible derivation paths to find ones that have UTXO history on at least one address. The plugin would then offer a drop down of "discovered" active derivation paths and allow the user to select the one to import into a wallet file, using that derivation path to follow the normal BIP39 derivation procedure. See https://walletsrecovery.org/ for a good list of how varied the derivation paths in different wallet implementations are.
I am considering funding this with a gitcoin grant, to encourage someone with experience to implement this, as well as attract more funding from others and more developers to Electrum.
At this stage, I'd like to gauge interest in the idea and see if there are any principled objections to doing this. I don't want to start any drama accidentally if this is an undesirable use-case or violates some kind of principle held by Electrum developers. I would like to fund this only if it is likely to succeed and be incorporated into a future release.
I see many newbies having trouble with recovery of BIP39 mnemonics when they don't know the mnemonic path, especially if created by a wallet that used a non-standard path. I am motivated to help them, while steering them away from dangerous alternative choices such as web-based seed derivation tools or giving their seeds to strangers in return for promises of help (both of which are often proposed on various forums). While this can be solved with a full node and a rescan, such a solution is not useful for newbies as it is too complex. A GUI-based self-hosted multi-platform solution like Electrum, that already has access to indexed UTXO scripts seems to fit perfectly with the use case and be more secure than alternatives.
I would like to fund a plugin that allows Electrum to import a BIP39 mnemonic such that it "scans" several possible derivation paths to find ones that have UTXO history on at least one address. The plugin would then offer a drop down of "discovered" active derivation paths and allow the user to select the one to import into a wallet file, using that derivation path to follow the normal BIP39 derivation procedure. See https://walletsrecovery.org/ for a good list of how varied the derivation paths in different wallet implementations are.
I am considering funding this with a gitcoin grant, to encourage someone with experience to implement this, as well as attract more funding from others and more developers to Electrum.
At this stage, I'd like to gauge interest in the idea and see if there are any principled objections to doing this. I don't want to start any drama accidentally if this is an undesirable use-case or violates some kind of principle held by Electrum developers. I would like to fund this only if it is likely to succeed and be incorporated into a future release.