Hi, I wanted to discuss few changes in BIP49
*- Breaking backwards compatibility * The BIP talks about breaking this, and but it really doesn't. I really feel it should completely break this. Here is why What would happen if you recover a wallet using seed words ? 1. Since there is no difference in seed words between segwit/non segwit, the wallet would discover both m/44' and m/49' accounts 2. Note that we cannot ask the user to choose an account he wants to operate on (Segwit/Non segwit). This is like asking him the HD derivation path and a really bad UI 3. The wallet now has to constantly monitor both m/44' and m/49' accounts for transactions Basically we are always stuck with keeping compatibility with older seed words or always asking the user if the seed words came from segwit/non segwit wallet ! Here is my suggestion : 1. By default all new wallets will be created as segwit m/49' without asking user anything. I think you would agree with me that in future we want most wallet to be default segwit (unless user chooses a non segwit from advanced options)! 2. Segwit wallet seed words have a different format which is incompatible with previous wallet seed words. This encodes the information that this wallet is segwit in the seed words itself. We need to define a structure for this *- XPUB Derivation* This is something not addressed in the BIP yet. 1. Right now you can get an xpub balance/transaction history. With m/49' there is no way to know whether an xpub is from m/44' or m/49' 2. This breaks lots of things. Wallets like electrum/armory/mycelium <https://blog.trezor.io/using-mycelium-to-watch-your-trezor-accounts-a836dce0b954>support importing xpub as a watch only wallet. Also services like blockonomics/ blockchain.info use xpub for displaying balance/generating merchant addresses Looking forward to hearing your thoughts
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