Cryptocurrency · 2013
BIP 39: Mnemonic code for generating deterministic keys
Bitcoin Improvement Proposal 39 · Applications · Specification · 10 September 2013
Encodes entropy as a sentence of words from a 2048-word list, shown in full, then derives a binary seed.
Read the text The whole poster as a web page
- Print from
- A2
- License
- MIT
- Source
- github.com
- Retrieved
- 27 September 2026
- Language
- English
- Rights holder
- Marek Palatinus, Pavol Rusnak, Aaron Voisine, Sean Bowe
Theme
Download
- A seriesPrints at A0, A1, A2 or A3
- 50 × 70 cm
- 60 × 80 cm
Every Cryptocurrency poster, in every format and theme, as one zip from the latest release.
Print from A2: the smallest A size at which the body text is at least 8 pt.
Wallpaper
Wallpapers are drawn in your browser from the PDF of the poster: this needs JavaScript.
Edition
The MediaWiki source of BIP 39 in the repository github.com/bitcoin/bips at commit 0d1b892 of 31 May 2026, its current version (status Deployed; License: MIT since February 2025; sections Shortcomings and Related Work added in May 2026), with its English wordlist bip-0039/english.txt (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/0d1b892ddb21c22def4af4541bfed7a2a3480e4a/bip-0039/english.txt, 2048 words, unchanged since 7 February 2014, SHA-256 2f5eed53a4727b4bf8880d8f3f199efc90e58503646d9ff8eff3a2ed3b24dbda). The preamble is in the header (title, number, layer, type, assigned date, authors and their addresses) and in the footer (all its fields). Links show their text, and bare URLs are set in monospace. The indented lines of the Wordlist section, which MediaWiki shows preformatted, are set as bulleted lists, and the four items of the Shortcomings list, parted by blank lines in the source, form one list. Straight quotes of the text are set as typographic quotes. The wordlist follows the text across the page, in its order, down as many columns as the width holds at its size (26 columns of up to 79 words in the A and 50x70 formats, 27 in 60x80), the first four letters of each word (which identify it, as the BIP states) in the ink and the others in a lighter tone; its path in the repository, bip-0039/english.txt, is set above it. Under it is the text of the MIT License as SPDX gives it (https://spdx.org/licenses/MIT.html), without its template copyright line, as the BIP has no copyright line.
Rights
License: MIT [...] This BIP falls under the MIT License.
Preamble and Copyright section of BIP 39 (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki), added by pull request 1680, merged on 4 February 2025 with the approval of three of its four authors: Pavol Rusnak (“ACK”), Marek Palatinus (“ACK MIT”) and Sean Bowe (“ACK MIT”); Aaron Voisine did not answer, and the BIP editor merged it because “for jointly authored work any of the authors can license the work” (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/pull/1680). BIP 3, the BIP process in force, states that the License header gives the terms under which “the BIP and its auxiliary files are available” (https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0003.md), which covers bip-0039/english.txt. The poster carries the MIT License text.
