easyseed(1)

The easy, secure multilanguage mnemonic phrase and seed generator for Bitcoin BIP 39

Now with full BIP 39 functionality

• By nullius <[email protected]>
• PGP: 0xC2E91CD74A4C57A105F6C21B5A00591B2F307E0C
• Bitcoin, tips welcome: 3NULL3ZCUXr7RDLxXeLPDMZDZYxuaYkCnG

I originally wrote this because I needed a lightweight, reliable BIP 39 mnemonic phrase generator with easily auditable sources and minimal dependencies for use on a stripped-down airgap machine. Correctness and reliability are important to me; thus, easyseed(1) has extensive built-in self-tests against the official test vectors. In addition to simple mnemonic generation, easyseed(1) can now optionally output:

• The input entropy in hexadecimal
• The mnemonic corresponding to that entropy
• The BIP 39 output seed, optionally generated with an additional passphrase
• The BIP 32 xprv master extended private key (do not use with Electrum)

The source code is written in (mostly sort of) KNF. It’s easy to read, and lovingly commented. Anybody with basic knowledge of the C programming language should be able to understand what it does at a glance.

easyseed(1) can generate mnemonics in all languages and writing systems for which a wordlist exists in the BIP 39 repository. Listed in alphabetical order:

• Chinese (Simplified) (汉语)
• Chinese (Traditional) (漢語)
• English [default]
• French (Français)
• Italian (Italiano)
• Japanese (日本語)
• Korean (한국어)
• Spanish (Español)

It has been tested on FreeBSD, my main platform, and on Linux. [Unfortunately, I may have slightly mussed the BSD building while preparing for publication; this should soon be fixed. The build system generally is still wonky. This is an early release, with most attention paid to the source code and manpage!]

For further details, RTFM. Yes, it has a manpage. Software is unworthy of release if it does not have a proper manpage.

License: AVL v0.0.1 with Bitcoin clause. I would prefer to disclaim copyright, and and release things to the public domain (the public domain is not a license, “CC0” people). However, this is not an ideal world.

Please direct usage discussion to the forum thread, and bugs or concrete technical matters to the issue tracker.

Installation

FreeBSD:

make && make check

...then, make install as root (via sudo or otherwise). Other BSDs are probably similar.

Linux (GNUmakefile instead of Makefile):

make && make check && sudo make install

To enable passphrase entry, you must have libbsd and its headers installed. (On Debian or Ubuntu, try sudo apt-get install libbsd-dev.) Then to build, type:

make LBSD=1 && make check && sudo make install