To: Luke Dashjr <luke@dashjr.org>, "bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org"
	<bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org>
References: <43636dd6-ab9e-da15-59ae-f31eb11ff7ff@electrum.org>
	<201709051303.43410.luke@dashjr.org>
From: Thomas Voegtlin <thomasv@electrum.org>
Message-ID: <41fb5a09-a964-a81b-497e-70a930b6923c@electrum.org>
Date: Tue, 5 Sep 2017 20:09:19 +0200
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Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Proposal: bip32 version bytes for segwit scripts
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On 05.09.2017 19:03, Luke Dashjr wrote:

> It seems desirable to use the same seed for all different script formats...

That does not seem desirable to everybody.

If you want to guarantee that users will be able to recover all their
funds from their mnemonic seed (and that is what they expect), then
wallets must implement all script formats, even the ones that are
deprecated. In addition, the list of script formats that must be
supported is not defined in advance, but it keeps growing. This makes
wallet implementation increasingly difficult. In the long run, seed
portability is guaranteed to fail in such a system.

> As you note, xpub\xprv are already being used for both P2PKH and P2SH. It 
> really doesn't make sense to differentiate segwit specifically.

That's not a reason. The fact that xpub/xprv can be used for both P2PKH
and P2SH has already resulted in users receiving coins on addresses they
do not control.