Any reason for new wallets to use SLIP132 version bytes going forward?

I originally wrote my seedpicker implementations (golang as well as in python in GUI, CLI, and Electrum formats) to use SLIP132 because that was the Electrum standard, but now that Specter-Desktop has gotten so much better than Electrum, I wonder if SLIP132 support still makes sense?

The main benefit I can see is that SLIP132 encoding does inform Specter-Desktop of the script type (p2wsh vs p2wpkh for example), but it seems like SLIP132 adds a lot complexity for this very simple purpose.

Would Specter-Desktop want to make a standard for exporting public keys from hardware wallets? Then we could retire SLIP132 for new wallet creation.

I’m thinking something like this but very open to other ideas: [f7d04090/48h/1h/0h/1h]tpubDF7FTuPECTePtSLgeKZsbMif6c91sq1q7gis9sTVMu1Y8CTfpSew1SYsv5k7vwHUojmrmoLSnZzfvQ6h1VNg2j7J84WSD14u3yyfkzbGB5x-p2wsh or [xfphex/path]xpub-scripttype

– It does lead to confusion, and also this part of the setup people will “set-it-and-forget-it” so whatever people use today they will likely still be using for many years/decades to come.

Sorry if this is the wrong place to post this.

[craigraw]

Thanks for the cc @ChristopherA.

Regarding SLIP32, I think there is a general movement away from it and towards using output descriptors to define wallets - certainly that’s the direction the Core wallet is moving in.

@mflaxman rather than a suffix with the script type, the specification for output descriptors already supports defining the script type as follows:

wsh([f7d04090/48h/1h/0h/1h]tpubDF7FTuPECTePtSLgeKZsbMif6c91sq1q7gis9sTVMu1Y8CTfpSew1SYsv5k7vwHUojmrmoLSnZzfvQ6h1VNg2j7J84WSD14u3yyfkzbGB5x)

The crypto-account specification @ChristopherA linked to above uses this to allow hardware wallets to supply a set of output descriptors with different script types for a particular BIP44 account. This allows the script type to be defined in Specter (implicitly or explicitly) and the correct xpub to be extracted from the set when pairing the hardware wallet, making for a simpler user experience. It seems this could be useful for seedpicker as well.

[Fonta1n3]

Agree with @craigraw here, output descriptors make slip0132 obsolete.