bipu

A CLI implementing various BIP utilities for managing digital wallets, including mnemonic sentence generation and conversion to 64-byte seeds (BIP-39) and derivation of private/public keys using BIP-32.

❯ MNEMONIC="$(bipu 39 new)"; echo $MNEMONIC
innocent firm example reason need dice firm cover apology thrive essay evidence

❯ bipu 32 -m "$MNEMONIC" --showpub m/44h/0h/0h/0/0
xprvA3hrZCjzECe5RbqUi6722uGjKtbQK78ZPLba98BgDpKFDuBYaFUwCXwwcgsC4cJWEfrSnepoCmf4DiMSFPcUX7UZ4P1NPBqt6bwgyiTLppg
xpub6GhCxiGt4aCNe5uwp7e2Q3DTsvRtiZrQkZXAwWbHn9rE6hWh7noBkLGRTzDeJL1GBb3Bqs9riMV41q99TK5qo3LjpdoA183iTTkj1hnR7Je

Installation and Usage

You will need to have the cargo toolchain (i.e. Rust) installed to build and install this tool. Installation should be relatively easy, though:

cargo install /path/to/bipu

Commands are generally named after the BIP number which they are implementing; for example, BIP-32 key derivation utilities are available through the command bipu 32. These commands also have a more descriptive alias if you prefer using that for scripting: for example, you bipu derive is equivalent to bipu 32.

For more details, run a command with the help flag, -h or --help:

bipu --help
# or
bipu 32 --help

BIP-32

BIP-32 allows you to derive many private keys from a parent seed (or, equivalently, a parent mnemonic sentence - see BIP-39). This specification thus describes hierarchical deterministic (HD) wallets, which can be shared entirely or partially with different systems, with or without the ability to spend coins.

Reference

BIP-39

BIP-39 describes the implementation of a mnemonic phrase - a group of easy-to-remember words - for the generation of deterministic wallets.

There are two parts to BIP-39: generating the mnemonic and converting it to a 64-byte binary seed. The seed can then be used to generate deterministic wallets using BIP-32, or something similar.

Reference

Note: In fact, there are no checks that your mnemonic is valid when converting to a binary seed. You could generate the binary seed of any text, but I wouldn't recommend using just any old text as a secure mnemonic. It's also possible to "manually" generate a mnemonic by just picking a few of your favorite words; I wouldn't recommend this either. You're not as unpredictable as you might think you are - it's best to just have a computer generate a mnemonic instead.

Note on the wordlist

The wordlist included in this package was suggested by my resource, although in general, you could swap out this word list with one of your own. There are a couple of considerations you might want to satisfy:

• The wordlist should be created in such a way that typing in the first four letters of a word disambiguates it from any other word in the list.
• Word pairs which are too similar (e.g. "through" and "thorough") should be avoided because they tend to cause human error.

It doesn't even really matter what language you use: theoretically there are non-English wordlists out there which you could use instead. However, there are many English-only implementations of BIP-39, so it's discouraged to use non-English wordlists.