Hacker News new | comments | show | ask | jobs | submit login yarvin9 182 days ago | parent | favorite | on: Fake Linus Torvalds' Key Found in the Wild, No Mor... A similar design is Proquint, which IPFS uses: https://www.npmjs.com/package/proquint Proquint (5 letters per 16 bits) is tighter than Urbit's `@p` (6 letters per 16 bits). The Urbit form was designed for synthetic names and restricts itself to phonemes that sound comfortable and natural to English speakers. (Not to say that English should be the universal language, it's actually a terrible language to make everyone learn, just that it is.) Word lists work reasonably well, but they're quite bulky and they don't take advantage of the human hardware accelerator for learning new words. When you have a GPU, use it. These kinds of synthetic strings also make great passwords, BTW. (Disclaimer: Urbit guy here.) ...