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03_4_Understanding_the_Descriptor.md
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@ -16,7 +16,7 @@ Most of this course presumes that you're working entirely from a single node whe
HD wallets offered a big step forward for managing this sort of interoperability, because they allowed you to load a single seed (or master extended private key) into a new wallet rather than having to move over a whole bag of keys. A few formats have been introduced to make it easy to move HD wallets, starting with seed phrases and the `xpub` and `xprv` formats. But they quickly proved inadequate. Seed phrases only defined the seed, not what it was used for. The `xprv` (and `xpub`) improved on that by defining the root of an HD tree, but they were very specific to a certain type of address. When a new address type was created, a new format was needed, resulting in the `yprv` and `ypub` formats. Then a third address type resulted in the creation of `zprv` and `zpub`. The system was quickly growing unmanageable. A new format was needed that described not just the extended keys, but also which address types they would be used to create. Because if you didn't have that, a new wallet would have to test a master extended public key against _every possible type of address_ and that was going to be very inefficient and time-consuming and still introduced the likelihood of losing funds.
> 📖 **What is a seed phase?** A collection of mnemonic words can define a seed. That seed is then used to generate an extended private key. Seed phrases are not currently used by Bitcoin Core, but they are in wide use in the larger Bitcoin ecosystem.
> 📖 **What is a seed phase?** A collection of mnemonic words can define a seed. That seed is then used to generate an extended private key. Seed phrases are not currently used by Bitcoin Core, but they are in wide use in the larger Bitcoin ecosystem. Future chapters will talk about how to use third-party tools to transform seed phrases into keys that can be imported into `bitcoin-cli`.
> 📖 ***What is xprv?*** Xprv stands for extended private key. This is the combination of a private key and a chain code. It's a private key that a whole sequence of children private keys can be derived from.