Why the 180 year limit? imho should plan for longer. On Fri, Aug 4, 2023 at 10:41 AM Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev < bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> tl;dr: Wallets don't last forever. They are often compromised or lost. When > this happens, the addresses generated from those wallets become a form of > toxic > data: funds sent to those addresses can be easily lost forever. > > All Bitcoin addresses have this problem. But at least existing Bitcoin > addresses aren't supposed to be reused. Silent Payments are: the whole > point is > to have a single address that you can safely pay to multiple times, without > privacy concerns. Failing to make Silent Payment addresses eventually > expire in > a reasonable amount of time is thus a particularly harmful mistake. > > Fixing this is easy: add a 3 byte field to silent payments addresses, > encoding > the expiration date in terms of days after some epoch. 2^24 days is 45,000 > years, more than enough. Indeed, 2 bytes is probably fine too: 2^16 days > is 180 > years. We'll be lucky if Bitcoin still exists in 180 years. > > Wallets should pick a reasonable default, eg 1 year, for newly created > addresses. Attempts to pay an expired address should just fail with a > simple > "address expired". Lightning invoices are a good example here: while > invoices > does not require expiration from a technical point of view, they do expire > for > similar UX reasons as applies to silent payments. > > -- > https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org > _______________________________________________ > bitcoin-dev mailing list > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev >
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