tl;dr;

It is dangerous to expect that other seed than "xprv" does not contain bitcoins or that "xprv" contains only bitcoins, because technically are both situations possible. It is still safer to do the lookup; the magic itself is ambiguous.

Marek

On Tue, Apr 8, 2014 at 3:40 PM, slush <slush@centrum.cz> wrote:

Serialization magic of bip32 seed is in my opinion completely unnecessary. Most of software does not care about it anyway; You can use xprv/xpub pair for main net, testnet, litecoin, dogecoin, whatevercoin.

Instead using the same seed (xprv) and then separate the chains *inside* the bip32 path seems more useful to me.

Marek