* advanced checksum based on Reed-Solomon linear code, which allows certain types of errors to be detected without false positives and provides limited error correction capability
* built-in way to make seeds incompatible between different coins, e.g. a seed for Aeon cannot be accidentally used to restore a Monero wallet
The mnemonic phrase uses the BIP-39 wordlist, which has 2048 words, allowing 11 bits to be stored in each word. It has some additional useful properties,
for example each word can be uniquly identified by its first 4 characters. The wordlist is available for 9 languages (this repository only uses the English list).
The mnemonic phrase stores the approximate date when the wallet was created. This allows the seed to be generated offline without access to the blockchain. Wallet software can easily convert a date to the corresponding block height when restoring a seed.
The wallet birthday has a resolution of 2629746 seconds (1/12 of the average Gregorian year). All dates between June 2020 and September 2105 can be represented.
The private key is derived from the 128-bit seed using PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA256 with 4096 iterations.The wallet birthday and the 5 reserved/feature bits are used as a salt. 128-bit seed provides the same level of security as the elliptic curve used by Monero.
The mnemonic phrase can be treated as a polynomial over GF(2048), which allows us to use an efficient Reed-Solomon error correction code with one check word. All single-word errors can be detected and all single-word erasures can be corrected without false positives.
To prevent the seed from being accidentally used with a different cryptocurrency, a coin-specific value is subtracted from the first data-word after the checksum is calculated. Checksum validation will fail unless the wallet software adds the same value back to the first data-word when restoring.
