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When you create an account, you are given a mnemonic seed that you have to write down. It's supposed to be used for recovering your coins if you lose access to your account (I think that's what it said when I created one).
But now I'm reading that the wallets are non-deterministic. So what's the mnemonic for then?
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From the source code, one can see that the mnemonic in fact only encodes your password and wallet identifier. You would still need to access you wallet data somehow to recover you coins.
Yep. The last chunk of words I know from experience represents the password (>5 words). It's 1 words in per 2 char combination so it's probably safe to say each word represents \u0000 to \uFFFF. A checksum is involved too. Changing the password changes the mnemonic's ending – Wizard Of Ozzie – 2014-09-29T11:39:02.817
@AussieCryptocurrency Each word represents two UTF-8 encoded bytes, which is two ASCII characters, or one character between \u0080 and \u07ff, or 2/3 of a character between \u0800 and \uffff, or 1/2 of any other character. – abacabadabacaba – 2014-09-29T11:59:05.207
Yeah that sounds right. I haven't learned JS so I haven't checked the source code. I just plugged in different values when I noticed 42 always spat out campsites. So it doesn't start at \u0000 bc they're whitespace keys correct? (EDIT; can you explain the 2/3 1/2 part? w/o a thread hijacking taking place? – Wizard Of Ozzie – 2014-09-29T12:04:32.567
@AussieCryptocurrency I think \u0000 in a password may not work due to UI problems. Regarding 2/3: if a character is encoded as 3 bytes, and each word encodes 2 bytes, how many characters does each word encode? – abacabadabacaba – 2014-09-29T12:33:35.737
I think the FAQ answer is muddled and, as the term is normally used, their wallets are deterministic. – David Schwartz – 2013-09-09T20:04:25.800
The FAQ specifically says there is no seed. Is it possible that their system has changed since you created your account? – Nate Eldredge – 2013-09-09T20:50:02.220
@NateEldredge It says "... you do not have to backup or remember an additional seed", which is somewhat confounding. That would be true of both deterministic and non-deterministic schemes. – David Schwartz – 2013-09-09T21:02:51.143
Anyone got an update on this? It looks like the mnemonic is just a password recovery tool. Not a deterministic seed. Sort of confusing. That would make the mnemonic functionally identical to the password. – pinhead – 2013-11-24T01:29:39.823
actually. One comment on reddit says the mnemonic encodes your password and wallet identifier. – pinhead – 2013-11-24T02:01:29.217