Yssn 🎩
@yssn
1) The web3 journey begins with the mysterious seed phrase. A poetic name to abstract a cryptic machinery. When you open a crypto wallet to self custody your assets, you’re asked to write down a list of 12 to 24 words. This is your seed phrase, also called mnemonic or recovery phrase.
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Yssn 🎩
@yssn
2) This phrase is a human readable version of a Master private key and is randomly composed from a list of 2048 words set by the BIP39 standard. This list exists in 9 languages and I hope Swahili will come next.
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Yssn 🎩
@yssn
3) From this single Master private key (also known as the Root private key), we can derive a large sequence of private/public key pairs and each private key can also derive a large sequence of key pairs. So we end up with an almost endless fractal of key pairs and each of these pairs can be an account on a blockchain.
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Yssn 🎩
@yssn
4) To put it simply, with the public key you can see what's in the account and with the private key you can transact. A common misconception is that the public key is your account address. Actually, the account address is derived from the account public key using a specific hash algorithm (Keccak256 for #ethereum).
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Yssn 🎩
@yssn
5) Voilà, I told you it was cryptic…fractally cryptic. All you have to keep in mind is that a single seed phrase is enough to generate and control a nearly infinite number of accounts, on any blockchain.
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Yssn 🎩
@yssn
6) This raises the issue of key management which is still not understood and causing billions of $ in asset losses, either permanently locked or stolen. But there is a very near future where your web3 journey may not have to start with a seedphrase anymore thanks to account abstraction... see you on next post!
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