Oddbean new post about login | logout What's the problem with seed words?
I'm not well versed in their history wrt bitcoin, but my impression is that they're only useful as a mnemonic. Fine for certain bitcoin applications, but how many people are memorizing their nsec? Apart from that, they're just a string of characters which in most cases only increase UX friction since apps usually force you to enter each word individually. Just use ncryptsec, which actually protects the key, to move things from app to app, and bunker sessions to actually use the key.
Yeah, air-gapped backup is another good use case. But again, makes sense with bitcoin where you have hardware wallets, less so with nostr since in order to use the key you either have to use a hardware signer or put your key in a computer, which obviates most of the security gain from air gapped transfer.
From the point of a non-technical user, seed phrases are more technical than opaque strings of characters, just by virtue of having a format. Users are pretty used to opaque strings, aka passwords. > Copying data to an external computer or drive isn't needed, a software key manager isn't needed, computer storage isn't needed, a printer isn't needed, a protocol for securely transmitting the key within a network isn't needed and etc. If you're not doing any of that with your phrase, what are you doing with it? I'm saying that seed phrases are not better than nsec (and worse than ncryptsec) for the very common use cases of sending them via digital messaging and for entering into apps and password managers. This is 99% of what people are doing with their keys, so we should optimize for the format that supports that.