Braydon Fuller @Braydon Fuller - 10d
What's the problem with seed words?
I don't think it's utility is in memorizing, very few people will do that and it's likely very unsafe to do that, even if technically possible. The utility I believe is the ease for secure air-gapped transmission of the secret for backing up or restoring in another application. It's a lot more straight forward to backup the secret by writing down a series of words that it is writing down a series of letters and prone to mistakes. It's a less technical option that many people will understand. As far as it being unencrypted, an additional password can be added to the words as the last piece of entropy for additional security. In my opinion, use should be encouraged with Nostr apps.
Even in the case that it isn't completely air-gapped, it also has the advantage of being a familiar, less technical and explicit secure backup with very few dependencies reducing surface area of vulnerabilities. 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.
Copying 12 or 24 words is more simple and efficient than 64 individual characters of hex (or even with bech32 encoding). That's what I mean by less technical, as copying is human focused. Some software or hardware would still be used when the key is hot, however it's isolated to just that software or device. Adding additional needs increases that surface area of potential problems and vulnerabilities.
