Adding a ledger to tezos-client

Question

In the past version of tezos-client you would run tezos-client show connected ledgers and it displayed 3 commands in order to import a new ledger. For example tezos-client import secret key XXX ledger://tz3RDC3Jdn4j15J7bBHZd29EUee9gVB1CxD9.

In the newer version of tezos-client the suggested import command changed to: `tezos-client import secret key XXX “ledger://small-donkey-tattered-capybara/ed25519/0'/0'”

Both commands still work, but both result in different addresses.

My question is why they result in different addresses? Furthermore, how are the 4 words in the 2nd example derived?

Answer 1

The difference is in the default derivation path suggested by the cli. If you use /0'/0' in both (or nothing in both) you should get the same keys.

The words are derived based on the hash of the root tz1 public key hash, and a list of adjectives and animals. The lists are sufficiently big that it's reasonably unlikely that you'd end up with two ledgers having different keys but the same name.