Interchange pycoin BIP32 with other wallets, i.e. Armory / Electrum

[nederhoed]

Hi there Richard, your pycoin library helped me understand BIP32 to a far extent. Thank you for that.

I'm trying to use BIP32 components between wallets. Specifically pycoin Wallet, Armory and Electrum. Since we're talking about BIP32, I expected this to be possible. But find it hard to get it working.

I tried the following two use cases:

1. use Armory Watch-only to monitor my deterministic wallet made using pycoin
2. generate a Wallet in pycoin from the Electrum seed that I saved on first install

Armory watch-only

Armory offers the import of a paper wallet (HD), which has a format something like this 'abcd efgh tral alal' for both the chain code as the secret exponent. I did not succeed to convert the pycoin Wallet secret and chain code to the format expected by Armory. The pycoin chain code is a binary blip.

The import of a digital wallet seems to be an Armory specific format.

Is it possible with pycoin to create something that Armory will accept? Or should we suggest the Armory team to offer imports of values closer to BIP32?

I would be satisfied if it were possible the other way around: to create the deterministic wallet in Armory and then use the secret and chain part in pycoin to generate individual addresses and private keys.

But there I also failed.

Electrum seed

This is analogous to the previous example. How to convert the Electum seed to be used in pycoin to generate addresses and private keys?

I would appreciate it if you could give me a few directions to get this working. Thank you!

[richardkiss]

Electrum uses a deterministic wallet that is different from BIP32. I have some preliminary code that generates Electrum addresses and WIFs, but it's not complete or checked in yet.

I've never used Armory and don't know much about it, so can't comment on its deterministic wallet mechanism. However, if you can point me to a reference, it shouldn't be too difficult to implement once the Electrum stuff is done (as the Electrum integration is mostly a refactoring problem).

[gmelika]

here is a reference for the armory implementation: https://github.com/brainwallet/brainwallet.github.io/blob/master/js/armory.js

[spinza]

Armory does not (yet?) user the standard HD wallet. It has a different format.